Maven Robotics Emerges From Stealth With $100M to Scale Industrial Robots

Maven Robotics is emerging from stealth with $100 million in funding and plans to expand production of industrial robots designed to automate demanding warehouse and logistics workflows.

The startup has raised capital from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Markets Ventures. It plans to build 250 units of its third-generation robot while beginning development of a fourth-generation platform.

Maven’s strategy centres on solving complete industrial tasks rather than building robots around isolated capabilities. CEO and co-founder Hamza Derbas said that approach helped the company win an early deployment with a large consumer goods company even when Maven had little more than an early robot concept and its founding team.

Maven targets mixed palletising in warehouses

Maven’s current robots use wheeled bases and two arms that can lift to 30 kilograms. The machines can travel up to 10 miles per hour and are primarily deployed for mixed palletising.

In that workflow, boxes arriving from different factories at a distribution centre must be reorganised onto new pallets containing the exact mix of products required by individual stores. Workers commonly handle the task by moving through warehouses and manually selecting different products for each outgoing shipment.

Maven wants its robots to automate that process from end to end, integrating with warehouse management systems and moving products through the workflow until they are ready for shipment.

After roughly two years of work with its initial customer and several other partners, Derbas said Maven has as many as eight robots operating for 16 hours a day with uptime of 99% or higher.

Self-driving technology influences Maven’s approach

Derbas previously spent nine years at Apple after a career in automotive engineering focused on electric vehicles. He worked in Apple’s special projects group, which was widely associated with the company’s discontinued self-driving vehicle effort.

After that group was disbanded in 2024, Derbas founded Maven with his brother Khalid Derbas, who became the startup’s chief financial officer after working in private equity.

Maven draws on techniques developed in autonomous vehicle programs, particularly using operational data to continuously improve physical AI systems. Information collected from deployed robots can return to Maven’s development pipeline, where teams retrain models, evaluate performance and deploy updated software back to the machines.

That feedback loop is intended to help robots improve based on conditions encountered in actual industrial facilities rather than relying solely on controlled research environments.

Industrial reliability comes before general-purpose robotics

RoboStrategy investor Jack Pearson said Maven’s emphasis on industrial systems distinguishes it from robotics companies built primarily around research programs or specific AI architectures. Maven is focusing on issues such as reliability, safety, operating conditions and measurable returns for customers.

Derbas has also questioned whether humanoid designs are necessary for many industrial applications. Maven instead uses wheeled robots, arguing that legs can add complexity, reliability challenges,s and cost when the job does not require human-like mobility.

The company nevertheless describes its long-term goal as building general-purpose robots. Rather than trying to reach that goal with one broad model, Maven plans to expand its capabilities one industrial task at a time.

Maven looks beyond palletising

Palletisation represents a large initial opportunity, but Maven plans to move into tasks that require more sophisticated robotic manipulation. Its next development phase will focus on collecting additional data and teaching robots to handle a wider range of materials before moving toward other automation and fabrication work.

The company plans to combine data from its own robotic systems with third-party sources. It has also developed pincer-like gloves that allow people to perform tasks using a form factor similar to the grippers Maven wants its robots to use, helping generate data for future manipulation capabilities.

“We’re grounded in solving one customer problem at a time,” Derbas said. “If you focus on solving problems and you pick sizeable problems, each problem is a multibillion-dollar market.”

The approach leaves Maven competing in a fast-moving physical AI market where both robotics startups and major AI labs are developing more capable models. Derbas said Maven does not view itself primarily as competing to build the most advanced model, but to make industrial automation work reliably at commercial scale.

“We’re not in the race for models,” Derbas said. “We’re in the race to solve industrial labor and make this work possible at the scale the world needs.”