ROMS

About ROMS

ROMS, Inc. is a Japanese automation and robotics company founded in June 2019 by Yosuke Maeno and two Polish co-founders to address labor shortages in the retail and supply chain sectors. Maeno, the President and CEO, has a background in retail, robotics, M&A, and venture capital from a major Japanese trading company and a global clothing retailer. The company develops proprietary hardware and software to create compact, affordable, and user-friendly automation solutions.

ROMS provides a vertically integrated suite of products for logistics facilities and retail stores, including hardware like picking robots and automated warehouses, middleware, software, and e-commerce applications. Its core offerings are the Nano-Fulfillment Center (NFC), a small-scale automated warehouse system, and Robotics Convenience Stores (RCS), which are unmanned staff-less nano stores. These solutions utilize robotic picking and automated warehouse technology to fulfill customer orders 24/7. The company also offers the Nano-Sorter, a high-speed piece sorter, and the Nano-Stream, an automated storage and retrieval system. Complementing its hardware, ROMS provides AI-driven demand prediction analytics and consulting services.

The company's business model involves the planning, design, development, and sale of these robotics and automation systems. It targets a range of clients from small and medium-sized enterprises to large corporations in the e-commerce, retail, and logistics industries. Initially, ROMS focused on unmanned convenience stores, launching a proof-of-concept store in Tokyo in 2020. Following market feedback, it expanded its focus to include nano-fulfillment centers for online supermarkets. By September 2022, the company had raised a total of 1.2 billion yen and partnered with KDDI Corporation to install an RCS for a quick commerce initiative.