Yesterday RoboStrategy announced our lead investment into Maven Robotics' $100M Series A.
Read our thesis on @mavenrobotics covering:
• What it takes to win enterprise contracts
• Why research culture keep robots stuck in pilots
• How to earn your right to valuable data through deployments
We may eventually reach a humanoid end state, but they are far from the optimal form factor for industrial warehouse settings.
@hamzaderbas, Khalid and the @mavenrobotics team knew this from the beginning and have been relentless in customer deployments, ignoring the noise in the market. Today their vision takes center stage, tomorrow they’ll be back on the factory floor.
Has to be said that few in SV have gone as deep as my partner @SinikDemren in robotics. Leading the seed was highly contrarian, and he was right.
RoboStrategy led Maven Robotics' $100M Series A.
Maven is building a general-purpose robotics system for industrial work which includes hardware, software and AI integrated across the robot, the fleet, the factory and the Maven-wide network.
Excited to see them making industrial work possible at the scale the world needs.
We led Maven Robotics' $100M Series A
Apple previously had an incredible special projects group building autonomous systems that attracted some of the top talent relevant to building a great AI Robotics company. The core Maven Robotics team was assembled from that group after it was shut down.
We often see many flashy demos of robots in the lab, but the Maven team is one of the few that have brought the robots out of labs, pilots, and into production environments with multiple shifts and >99% uptime.
Our thesis has always been that the winning robotics companies will be vertically integrated, have deep cross functional experience, be aggressive in prioritizing real deployments and Maven is a great embodiment of that
Announcing Maven Robotics' $100M Series A, led by RoboStrategy
Follow @mavenrobotics and CEO @hamzaderbas as they come out of stealth today.
Read the TechCrunch article here:
https://t.co/RW4GjAaWiz
We led Maven Robotics' $100M Series A.
Maven designs, builds, and deploys intelligent robotics for logistics and manufacturing. The purpose-built system integrates hardware, software, and AI across the robot, fleet, factory, and Maven network.
Congratulations @hamzaderbas and the @mavenrobotics team. Robots have a job to do.
JUST IN:
@mavenrobotics just emerged from stealth with $100M raised, and the founding story is one of the best I've heard in robotics.
In 2024, CEO @hamzaderbas had a cartoon of a robot and a team of people.
He heard a large consumer goods company was in town meeting four rival robot companies about automation. He talked his way into the room, and instead of pitching, asked to visit their factories.
He won the deal. Beating companies with actual robots.
Two years later? Here is Maven building its own robots! 😮💨
The robots are wheeled, dual-arm platforms moving at 10 mph with 30 kg payload, built for mixed palletizing, one of the most labour-intensive tasks in warehouse logistics.
Within 48 hours of goods hitting shelves, retailers want to change the mix based on real-time demand. Today that's all done by humans running around warehouses. Maven automates the whole thing end-to-end.
The $100M round comes from @RoboStrategy, @localglobevc, Vine Ventures and XTX Markets.
Plans? 250 third-gen robots and a fourth-gen platform in design.
Derbas spent nine years at Apple's special projects group, widely believed to be the self-driving car programme, before founding Maven with his brother Khalid.
His take on bipedal humanoids in warehouses is worth reading:
"They make zero sense for anything they're doing. Very complex, unreliable, and add unnecessary cost. ROI is the name of the game."
Harsh. But probably right for most industrial use cases today.
Maven's thesis is to solve one customer problem at a time.
Pick problems big enough that each one is a multi-billion-dollar market. Master the skills. Move to the next.
Grounded. Profitable. Scaling.
This is how you build a robotics company.
🔗 Here's a TechCrunch story: https://t.co/uRSgAXfuWF
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♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → https://t.co/GoA3ZuwoPB
I’m grateful to our team, customers, partners, and investors for believing in our approach.
If you like solving hard problems, think in systems, and want to shape the future of industrial robotics, come build with us. (4/4)
https://t.co/NCDSvs5hTY
After two years of building quietly, we’re introducing @MavenRobotics to the world.
When Khalid and I started Maven, we were excited by advances in autonomy, but saw a disconnect: technology was moving fast, while deployment lagged.
Where are all the factory robots? (1/4)
Our robots master real tasks with immediate impact, industrial-grade reliability, and intelligence that compounds at scale.
The more they work, the more the system learns — and the closer we get to infinitely elastic industrial capacity. (3/4)
Today, Maven Robotics officially launches. 🙌
After two years in stealth, we’re introducing the first general-purpose robotics system for industrial work, backed by $100M in Series A funding.
We’re excited to finally share where we’re headed next.
Read more 👇 (1/7)