Jim Rock has stepped down as CEO of Seegrid after nearly a decade. Seegrid is a Pittsburgh-based developer of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for logistics operations. Joe Pajer has been named the new CEO of Seegrid, effective immediately. Pajer, who obtained both his master's in management and bachelor's in civil engineering, engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University, most recently served as the president and CEO of Calero Software, a Rochester, New York-based provider of communications and cloud lifecycle management solutions that merged with a competitor – MDSL – in 2019. He served as president and CEO of two other companies: Thinklogical, a Connecticut-based IT firm, and Vocollect, a Pittsburgh-based software maker that now operates as a division of Honeywell Safety & Productivity Solutions.

AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. UPS and FedEx anticipate delivering close to 1 billion packages in the next few weeks. Moving that much merch quickly and accurately would be impossible without the recent automation revolution in the logistics industry. Robotics technology developed by Kiva has enabled Amazon to fulfill orders same-day in many locations. Though human workers still play a vital (albeit controversial, according to recent reports) role in the picking, packing, and palletizing that go into dispatching goods to your doorstep, there can be no question that we're getting ever-closer to a so-called lights-out shipping warehouse, one in which all the workers are robots.

Seegrid, a robotics company that makes autonomous industrial vehicles, is expecting to double its revenue for the second year in a row. The Pittsburgh-based company just announced that it has raised 12 million of equity capital from Giant Eagle, its majority shareholder, and several other existing and new investors, and has a commitment for an additional 13 million from Giant Eagle. Seegrid's VP of product and services Jeff Christensen tells ZDNet, "It shows a lot of confidence that our investors have in what we're doing and the technology and the company itself. We are getting a lot of market traction." Industrial automation is a rapidly growing field with plenty of players, so I spoke with Christensen to find out why Seegrid has been so successful.