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A robot made by Bossa Nova Robotics scans inventory at the Natrona Heights Walmart location on Wednesday, May 15, 2019.
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Bossa Nova Robotics announces cuts to Pittsburgh workforce

Andrew Rush/Post-Gazette

Bossa Nova Robotics announces cuts to Pittsburgh workforce

Bossa Nova Robotics, the tech company behind the autonomous robots that keep retail stores stocked and organized, is cutting its workforce.

The San Francisco-based company announced Monday it was terminating or furloughing 61 employees across four offices, including its location in the Strip District.

The cuts will affect several departments, with the majority coming from the software and operations teams.

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Bossa Nova, founded as a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in 2005, has five offices in the United States as well as one in the United Kingdom. The terminations and furloughs will affect employees at four of those locations: San Francisco; Mountain View, Calif.; Leetsdale, Pa.; and Pittsburgh.

A robot made by Bossa Nova Robotics checks inventory in a mockup Wal-Mart aisle at the company's test lab on Friday, November 3, 2017 in the Strip District.
Lauren Rosenblatt
Bossa Nova robots will be in 1,000 Walmart stores this year

The company did not say how many employees would be affected from each office and how many would be permanently terminated versus temporarily furloughed. It announced the cuts in a letter filed with the Bureau of Workforce Development Partnership and Operations.

The cuts will begin Wednesday and continue Friday, according to the letter.

Bossa Nova has raised $101.6 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, a portal where startups can self-report funding rounds.

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In January, Bossa Nova announced a partnership with Walmart to deploy 1,000 robots in their stores, where the bots would move autonomously through the aisles and alert employees of everything from low inventory to mispriced products.

Lauren Rosenblatt: lrosenblatt@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1565.

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First Published: June 29, 2020, 8:28 p.m.

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