Maven Robotics raises $100 million for warehouse robots
Startup Maven Robotics has emerged from stealth mode and raised $100 million in a Series A round. Investors included RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Markets Ventures, TechCrunch reports. The company plans to manufacture 250 third-generation robots and begin designing a fourth-generation platform.
Mixed palletizing
Maven's robots are mounted on wheeled bases, have two arms, and can move at speeds of up to 10 miles per hour. They can lift loads weighing up to 30 kilograms.
Their main task is mixed palletizing. A distribution center receives pallets containing boxes of goods from different factories, and the robot builds a new pallet with the required set of goods for shipment to a store. This set can change according to current demand. According to Maven co-founder and CEO Hamza Derbas, this work is currently mostly performed by warehouse workers, who manually pick different products.
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First deployments
Maven was founded in 2024 by Hamza Derbas and his brother Khalid Derbas, who serves as chief financial officer. Before launching the startup, Hamza Derbas worked in automotive engineering and spent nine years in Apple's Special Projects Group.
The company signed its first contract with a major consumer goods company even though it did not yet have finished robots at the time. Derbas says that after two years of work with this customer and several other partners, Maven has up to eight robots operating 16 hours a day with uptime of 99% or higher.
Going forward, the startup plans to collect more data to train robots for material handling, and later move on to automation and manufacturing tasks. The company has also created gloves with tweezer-like elements that allow people to reproduce the grip shapes needed for the robots.
