Brightpick, the AI warehouse automation startup, is significantly expanding its partnership with Dr. Max Group — Europe's largest pharmacy chain — with the deployment of 44 additional Autopicker autonomous mobile robots across new facilities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Once the projects go live in the second half of 2026 the total fleet operating across the group will reach 74 units.
From Prague pilot to multi-country rollout
The collaboration began in late 2023 with nine Autopicker robots at the Prague distribution centre of Viapharma, Dr. Max's pharmaceutical wholesale and hospital-logistics sister company. The Prague fleet has since grown to 30 robots and now processes up to 20,000 items a day with minimal human intervention — a setup that Brightpick says has cut manual picking labour by 95 percent, increased warehouse capacity by 40 percent and effectively eliminated picking errors.
Two new hubs, two use cases
The next wave of deployments splits the same technology across two very different workloads. Viapharma Ostrava will receive 22 Autopickers to automate stock replenishment and medicine picking for pharmacies and hospitals — a near-copy of the Prague configuration. Dr. Max Bratislava will take another 22 units, but there the robots will be tuned for the group's rapidly growing e-commerce order flow, where the priority is dispatch speed rather than volume replenishment.
Why pharmacy logistics is a proving ground
Pharmaceutical distribution is one of the least forgiving corners of warehouse work: accuracy has to be near-perfect, cold-chain and expiry rules dictate storage, and hospitals expect same-day replenishment. Brightpick CEO Jan Zizka says the ability to serve both traditional pharmacy replenishment and consumer e-commerce with the same fleet is what convinced Dr. Max to standardise on the platform. It also fits a broader trend in Europe, where Brightpick has been packaging Autopicker and Gridpicker into pre-integrated fulfilment cells that can drop into existing distribution centres without structural work.
Physical AI in the aisle
The Autopicker itself is a multi-purpose autonomous mobile manipulator equipped with what Brightpick calls patented Physical AI technology and 3D vision, picking and consolidating orders directly in the warehouse aisle rather than at fixed workstations. The system is fully scalable without structural warehouse modifications and can flex with seasonal peaks — a design point that has also been adopted in other recent warehouse robot deployments. The Dr. Max expansion follows a wave of European pharmacy and hospital automation deals, and lines up with headline-grabbing US pharmacy pilots such as Cleveland Clinic's drone prescription delivery.
Reporting based on coverage from Robotics & Automation News and Brightpick.