Exotec Brand Guidelines: Two Lille Engineers, the Skypod Robot and the Imaginarium

Two engineers and a robot that climbs.

Exotec was founded in June 2015 by Romain Moulin and Renaud Heitz, according to English and French Wikipedia; the company says it was founded that year in Lille and began as “the brainchild of two engineers.” French Wikipedia says both had worked at BA Systèmes and at General Electric before, that the company was first called Exotec Solutions, and that its aim was an automated order-preparation system built around a fleet of agile robots. English Wikipedia describes an early prototype, called Exo, which travelled through a warehouse to pick items off the shelves for workers.

The idea that stuck was different. The Skypod system, as The Robot Report described it in January 2022, uses mobile robots that move by themselves to a rack, retrieve a bin of up to 30 kilograms and carry it to a picking station, where an operator takes out the goods. English Wikipedia says the robots move both horizontally and vertically, climbing between the storage racks; in January 2022 tech.eu put their reach at just under 11 metres, and the company’s website now offers racks of up to 14 metres. The same Robot Report article described Skypicker, an articulated arm that could be used in place of a human picker at the station.

The first customer was Cdiscount, the French online retailer. French Wikipedia says Cdiscount deployed the Skypod system at its Bordeaux warehouse in the first quarter of 2017, while English Wikipedia dates the first fleet to December 2017. French Wikipedia also says production began in Lille in 2017 and then moved to Croix, to a 1,500-square-metre site with two production lines, and that Exotec joined the Next40 list of French start-ups in February 2021.

Funding, offices and a new headquarters.

The company was built on venture capital. French Wikipedia says its first money came from business angels in 2015, followed in December 2016 by the investment firms 360 Capital Partners and Breega, and in June 2018 by a round that added Iris Capital; a further round in September 2020 was raised to expand in Japan and the United States. In January 2022 Exotec announced a Series D funding round led by the growth-equity business of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, The Robot Report reported; French Wikipedia lists Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund and 83North alongside it. French Wikipedia says the round made Exotec the 25th French “unicorn,” and the only industrial company on that list; English Wikipedia calls it the country’s first industrial unicorn. Romain Moulin was described as co-founder and chief executive at the time, and he still holds both titles in coverage from February 2026.

The company spread abroad in the same years. French Wikipedia says it opened offices in Atlanta in May 2021, which English Wikipedia describes as its United States headquarters, and an R&D centre in Lyon the following year. The company’s own site also lists offices near Munich, in Tokyo and in Seoul, and describes Lille as the place “where it all began.”

On 3 February 2026 Exotec announced the opening of the Imaginarium, its new global headquarters at Wasquehal in northern France. Forkliftaction reported on 12 February 2026 that the site covers 25,000 square metres and brings more than 700 employees together, from design to production and support, and that it includes an 8,560-square-metre production area equipped with 11 working Exotec systems, used for manufacturing, testing and continuous improvement. “Imaginarium represents a major technological and industrial investment,” Moulin said in that report. The opening also marked the first Exosummit, a gathering of the company’s customers and partners, according to the company.

Cubes, swarms and shuttles.

Warehouse automation is an industry that mostly sells to other businesses, and its companies present themselves through the machines they install. The images are familiar across the sector: a dense block of stacked storage bins with robots running across the top, a swarm of small mobile robots moving under or up tall racks, or long shuttle aisles feeding a line of conveyors and sorters inside a distribution centre.

Those images do a job that a product catalogue cannot. A storage grid or a robot fleet is usually built to fit one building, so the companies show finished sites, walk-through videos and case studies named after their customers. Many also describe themselves as software companies as much as machine builders, and show control-room screens and dashboards that track robots, orders and stock in real time.

Trade fairs are where the sector meets its buyers. LogiMAT in Germany, ProMat in the United States and CeMAT are among the logistics shows where makers build working demonstration systems on their stands, and where new robots and workstations are often launched. Many of the companies also sell through partners and system integrators, so the same system can appear under more than one name on a show floor.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its equipment is made, and what has happened to it — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not the companies’ official colours or logos.

Made in France, by its own account.

Exotec makes a point of where its systems are built. Its manufacturing page says production in France keeps the factory close to the design team, so changes can be made quickly; it describes paperless factories with digital assembly instructions, checks on each component as it arrives, and several suppliers for each part, many of them European. “We are proud to support local manufacturing in France,” the company says. The Imaginarium’s production floor, reported by Forkliftaction, is the documented part of that claim.

The offer has grown from a single robot into a whole warehouse system. The company’s website now groups robots and racks with picking stations, the Skypath conveyors that link the storage to the rest of a warehouse, an Exchanger for sequencing outbound orders and store replenishment, and Deepsky, its warehouse software. English Wikipedia says a second version of the Skypod system was launched in 2025. French Wikipedia names customers in grocery, e-commerce, fashion and industry, among them Leclerc, Carrefour, Uniqlo and Renault.

For a design guide, Exotec shows how a young engineering company can build a name around one memorable product — a robot that climbs — and then around a building. Compare AutoStore, whose robots work across the top of a storage cube, and HAI ROBOTICS, another maker of robots that reach into tall racks. For this guide we use a deep teal, a rack blue and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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