Rick Cohen

BIOGRAPHY

Why a Tech Power Player? For leading the best-performing tech company in the region.

Rick Cohen, chief executive of the Wilmington warehouse robotics company Symbotic, always has his eyes on expansion.

After signing retail giant Walmart as the lead customer for the company’s automated box sorting systems, Cohen took Symbotic public in 2022 in a deal that valued the company at $10 billion. In 2023, Cohen struck a deal with Japanese tech company SoftBank Group in a venture to offer automated warehouse storage to smaller retailers. The deal helped boost Symbotic’s order backlog to $23 billion.

Now the New Hampshire billionaire is looking for more places to put Symbotic’s robots to work. 

“A confluence of technologies,” Cohen says in an email, “made it possible for Symbotic to design a system that could potentially move every box in the world with greater efficiency.” 

A new system dubbed BreakPack, which handles individual items instead of cartons of goods, is ready for customers, Cohen told Wall Street analysts in February. And Symbotic is tweaking its carton-moving robots to handle perishable goods at low temperatures.

“I can’t give you a number for the market,” Cohen told analysts, “but it’s a big market.” 

Overall sales are accelerating. Last year, revenues hit almost $1.2 billion, nearly double the revenues of 2022, and Symbotic’s stock price rose 330 percent—the best performance of any local tech company. The value of Cohen’s 38 percent stake, which includes the holdings of family trusts, rose to more than $10 billion. 

Cohen spent almost 30 years running his family’s grocery business, C&S Wholesale Grocers, before shifting to head up the robotics business as CEO six years ago. But he was constantly experimenting with automation technologies for his grocery warehouse, building one of the most advanced sorting and storage systems at a facility in York, Pennsylvania, in the 1990s.

Cohen is also known for having sharp elbows. He was deeply involved in Symbotic’s operations as chairman of the board as the company went through three CEOs in six years, from 2011 until the end of 2017. Cohen then stepped in as chief executive, giving up the top job at C&S. In 2022, Cohen recruited longtime electronics industry exec Michael Loparco to take over at Symbotic, but the partnership lasted only eight months. Loparco departed and Cohen returned to the CEO role.

But Symbotic hasn’t missed a beat. Sales rose 80 percent in the first quarter. 

— Aaron Pressman, Globe Staff