Destro AI Raises $8M Seed to Coordinate Robots and Human Workers in Logistics

Founder Manthan Pawar, an NYU Tandon robotics master’s graduate with roughly eight years in the U.S. supply chain and robotics industry, told TechCrunch that many robotics companies begin with engineers asking what cool things they can do. Destro instead starts from customer problems, he said. “One of the biggest reasons we are winning against robotics companies is because we are not a robotics company,” Pawar said.

The approach drew the attention of Richard Brunelle, director of automation for the American logistics group at Yusen Logistics, a South Korean shipping giant. Brunelle oversees automation at about 30 U.S. facilities. Yusen uses fixed automation such as conveyors and sorters and is piloting technologies including trailer-unloading robots and autonomous floor scrubbers. Its UK subsidiary has built a fully autonomous facility, and a similar plan is being developed in the U.S., according to TechCrunch.

When Brunelle met Pawar, Destro was focused on picking and packing, in which goods are sorted into individual packages. Brunelle’s main challenge was cross-docking: unloading goods from one truck and sorting them into mixed loads for other trucks that make final deliveries. He said he asked whether Destro would adapt its solution to the cross-dock environment because he did not think anyone was doing that. The company considered it, returned excited, agreed nobody was addressing the space, and went all in, Brunelle told TechCrunch.

Destro began with a pilot at one Yusen facility in the Pacific Northwest. It used three cart-moving robots built by Miva Robotics and operated by Destro’s Vision operating system, which is based on open-weight vision-language-action models. Those AI systems interpret camera images and instructions to control robot movements. As human workers unload goods from a truck into different carts, the robots find full loads and take them to their destinations.

Brunelle and Pawar said the efficiency comes from Destro’s Mothership operating system directing the human, the cart, and the trucks. “We make that operation less labor intensive, and we get away from the paper,” Brunelle said. “Everything is now systematic.”

Yusen also spoke with two other big-name robot startups in the space, according to TechCrunch. Neither could fit into Yusen’s workflow. One offered a robot that could move carts point-to-point but could not manage loading or unloading. The other provided fleet management tools but required a person to handle all orchestration. Destro won because it could apply autonomous direction to the whole process.

Destro is now expanding the initial pilot to a full deployment of 26 robots and launching another pilot with 17 robots at Yusen’s facility in Southern California. Pawar plans to copy and paste the cross-dock loading workflow across thousands of other warehouses that handle similar labor. TechCrunch reported that the plan convinced Base10 Partners and Bonfire Ventures to lead the seed round, with additional investment from CoFound Partners.

Destro could face challenges in workflows requiring more dexterity and manipulation. Generic robot bodies and open-source models have not proved capable at those tasks yet, and it is unclear whether companies building foundation models, ultra-dexterous hands, or general-purpose humanoids will make their tools available to a company like Destro or try to capture that business themselves. Pawar remains confident Destro has found the layer where value will accrue and can benefit from research spending on new AI models and robot components.

“Robots are a platform. Every layer model is a platform. But we build a harness around it,” Pawar told TechCrunch. “That harness is just so complex and value-added that without that harness, these workflows are completely impossible, right?” For now, competing with futuristic robot-builders is probably not an issue, according to TechCrunch.