“Inspiring Women to Overcome Obstacles”

As a young girl, Hanna Yanovsky was influenced by Jo March from the book “Little Women.” She appreciated Jo’s independence and the fact that even though she lived in an environment that didn’t necessarily respect creative women, she nonetheless succeeded in becoming a writer, even going against the time's social standards. This resonates for Hanna today, as she believes it is important to recognize that any ‘glass ceiling’ that exists is only a barrier because of some social standard, and in 10-15 years, the situation will be different. Hanna encourages women and others today not to ‘obey’ these rules, but rather to question them, “sometimes it’s a matter of questioning those ‘rules’ that will drive the changes over time.”

“Caja offers a robotic mini-load ASRS for goods-to-person order fulfillment and robotic warehouse automation.”

Hanna is a critical member of the leadership team at Caja Robotics, where she is in charge of building the platform to meet market needs, business development, and growth strategy. Hanna oversees marketing and sales at Caja Robotics, with other horizontal responsibilities that include identifying relevant segments, determining which customers to approach, a closing transaction with customers, entering new markets, and making sure the company addresses customers’ needs. She is responsible for “how and when” Caja Robotics enters a new market, which strategic partners to cooperate with and how, and works across departments to ensure the company meets customers’ needs. A critical component of Hanna’s role is introducing Caja Robotic’s technologically advanced solution to different industry segments and players and ensuring that Caja’s solution matches their needs. She also focuses on overall growth for the company, experiencing significant opportunities and growth in the US, EU, and the Middle East. This is done closely with other management and team members, as Hanna believes in team’s efforts.

Caja was founded in 2014 by Guy Glass to understand that the fulfillment centers market needed an automated solution, based on his personal experience in the sector. He decided to establish the company and develop the Caja solution together with others - Reuven Della-Torre, who became co-founder and a CTO, and Dr. Ilan Cohen, who became the Chairman CEO. Since then, they have developed the robotics solution and products to meet some of the major pain points of the market, including the drive for retailers and 3PLs to automate their fulfillment centers, the rapid growth of eCommerce globally, together with an increase in daily deliveries, and the recurring labor shortage of warehouse workers.

Hanna joined Caja Robotics in 2019 together with Ilan Cohen, intending to take the company, with the other team members, to the next level as a global player in the industry. Together with Ilan Cohen, they led several financial rounds of the company, most recently in 2020. In the past year, she has overseen the team's building, especially in Israel, the US, and Europe.

“The logistics market and the world of ecommerce is changing rapidly, and as we have seen this past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on the market, with dramatic increases in demand and e-commerce activity that has grown across all segments,” says Hanna. “Caja offers a unique robotic and software solution for warehouse automation. Warehouse automation is a dynamic and evolving sector.”

Caja is becoming gloabal and currently experiencing significant growth; 2020 was a turning point for Caja, both internally and externally. “We have prepared all the building blocks to address high volume projects with hundreds of robots in different territories and we’re expanding globally,” she says. “We operate in the fashion, footwear, 3PL and grocery verticals, with projects of varying scales and we have customers and opportunities in the US, Europe, the Far East and Middle East.” The company is constantly working to enhance and develop technology to meet the needs of the dynamic, fast-evolving sector as eCommerce and global markets evolve exponentially.

"The core of Caja’s solution is our advanced technology," says Hanna. "We’re able to address the specific pain points of our customers with a set of tools that include AI and machine learning, advanced robotics, and relatively fast deployment that maintains an attractive ROI for customers. At every given time there will be a customer working with our solution somewhere in the world. At Caja, we see ourselves as partners with the customers, our solution will continue to operate within the customers’ fulfilment center for many years and thus needs to offer stability, reliability as well as ability to address some changing needs along the way." IE