Maven Robotics Emerges From Stealth With $100 Million, Plans 250 Robots

The deal began in 2024, when Maven was new and had what CEO and co-founder Hamza Derbas described to TechCrunch as “a cartoon of a robot and a team of people.” Derbas learned that a large consumer goods company with logistics needs was in town to meet four rival robot companies. He talked his way into a meeting and, rather than discussing his views on robots, asked to visit the company’s factories and warehouses.

“We saw how people were working; we zeroed in on flows we could immediately bring value to,” Derbas told TechCrunch. “We showed them that our approach to robotics is different—we’re not trying to solve a single robot problem. We’re trying to autonomously take on the task end to end: It hooks in from one side to a warehouse management system; product goes on trucks on the other side.”

Maven won the deal, beating companies that already had robots. After two years of work with that customer and a few other partners, Derbas said Maven has as many as eight robots working 16 hours a day with 99% or higher uptime.

The robots sit on wheeled bases and can move 10 miles an hour; they have two arms that can lift up to 30 kilograms. Their main job is mixed palletizing: wooden pallets carrying boxed goods arrive from different factories at a distribution center, and the robot builds a new pallet containing a mix of goods for a store. Derbas described the demand as changing based on real-time demand within 48 hours of products being placed on shelves. “Here’s an order with different mixed [products] going to that retail store; please build it out. It’s all done with human labor today, running around the warehouse picking one of this, one of that,” he told TechCrunch.

At Maven’s Santa Clara facility, TechCrunch reported, a robot moves smoothly in a training area, using vacuum suckers to pick up and arrange boxes at a reasonable speed. A live video screen shows two robots working in a customer facility while employees walk around them.

Derbas spent his career in automotive engineering, with a focus on EVs, and before Maven worked nine years at Apple in the company’s special project group, which he would not discuss but is widely thought to have been building a self-driving car before it was disbanded in 2024. He started Maven with his brother, Khalid, who is the company’s CFO after a career in private equity. Like other physical AI companies, Maven relies on veterans of self-driving car efforts, which have developed sophisticated approaches to training autonomous hardware from real data. That requires data pipelines returning information from operating robots within minutes or hours, followed by retraining, evaluation, ablation studies, weight selection, redeployment and repeating the loop, according to TechCrunch.

In a crowded robot market, Maven says it stands apart by focusing on the realities of industrial operation. Jack Pearson, an investor at RoboStrategy, which backed the company, said what sets Maven apart is its background in industrial systems, rather than a research culture optimized for learning or focused on a specific architecture. Agility, the robotics company going public this fall in a $2.4 billion SPAC deal, might be the most similarly positioned firm, focused on safety and specific industrial workflows. But its robots stand on two legs, and Derbas, while stressing his respect for the company, told TechCrunch that legs “make zero sense for anything they’re doing…they are very complex, unreliable, and add unnecessary cost. ROI is the name of the game here.”

Maven’s understanding of overheated facilities and the needs of the people who operate them helped the startup get out the door, but if it wants to expand beyond current workflows, it will need to figure out some kind of research culture, according to TechCrunch. Palletization might be an $80 billion market, but the next tasks the company targets will require robotic manipulation capabilities that do not yet exist.

Maven’s next push is to collect more data and train its robots to handle materials, then to move toward automation and fabrication. The company will draw on its own systems, tap third-party providers, and has developed a pair of pincer-like gloves that allow humans to emulate the form factor it wants for its grippers. While Maven bills itself as a maker of general-purpose robots, its strategy is to go task by task toward that goal. “We’re grounded in solving one customer problem at a time,” Derbas told TechCrunch. “If you focus on solving problems and you pick sizeable problems, each problem is a multi-billion-dollar market.”