Brightpick's Journey From Imaging Spinoff to Automation Powerhouse

As humans go, Jan Zizka’s SEO sucks. In Slovakian terms, it’s like going through life named George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Alexander the Great (the latter, admittedly, probably qualifies as more of a nickname).  

“My grandfather and my father had the same name, so I would say it was kind of [an] obvious choice,” Brightpick’s CEO says with a laugh. He adds that sharing a name with a legendary Czech military leader has its perks in certain corners of the world. “It works in smaller central Europe. People always joke about it, so I would say it's somehow useful.”  

The O.G. national hero Jan Zizka, who commanded the Taborite faction amid the Hussite Wars, doesn’t have quite the same gravity in the executive’s new home of Austin, Texas. For those conversations that command an icebreaker halfway around the world, however, there’s always the haircut. Business in the front, party in the back, as they say. Here, Zizka says, a direct line can be drawn to a longstanding interest in electronic music.  

In the States, of course, the question of what music one listens to is significantly less consequential than what one does for a living. When the question is asked in Austin, you can certainly do worse than CEO of a robotics firm, as the Lone Star capital increasingly becomes a hot zone for physical AI and automation firms, including Apptronic, Fox Robotics, and Tesla.  

Like Zizka, Brightpick’s roots can be traced back to Slovakia. The startup began life as a spinout of his earlier 3D imaging company, Photoneo. Much of the team went on to build the logistics automation firm in early 2021, as the pandemic shined a light on weaknesses in the global supply chain.  

“We had seen that AI is really going to take off,” says Zizka. “We can pick unknown items, because it can generalize to unseen items. That was an opening to enter for the logistics world… Picking was simple, placing was difficult in logistics. Even picking is quite challenging because we have completely unknown parts, coming every day — new parts, unseen parts, and so on. So that was the first argument. Second was that we somehow realized that it may be quite difficult to scale the platform of vision and intelligence.” 

Brightpick continued making a name for itself in warehouse automation over the past half decade, picking up clients like Napa Autoparts and sports nutrition retailer, The Feed. Photoneo, meanwhile, was acquired by enterprise giant, Zebra technologies. The company’s new high-density, top-down picking system, Grid Picker, was slated to debut at the end of March at LogiMat in Stuttgart. A last-minute preliminary injunction led the company to instead cover its booth with a large sheet instead.  

Ocado’s suit has also barred Grid Picker sales in Germany — at least for the time being. Brightpick has filed pre-emptive suits — including one here in the States — in a bid to avoid similar headaches in other markets. 

“In principle, we just want to prove we are not infringing anything,” says Zizka. “It’s some kind of noise we have to solve, but I don't see that as a problem.”