Maven Robotics raises $100 million to put warehouse robots to work 16 hours a day

Key points

• Maven Robotics raised $100 million in May 2025 from investors including RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Markets Ventures.
• The company's wheeled robots run up to 16 hours a day with 99% or higher uptime at current customer sites.
• Maven's machines move at 10 miles per hour and can lift up to 30 kilograms, roughly the weight of a large bag of dog food.
• CEO Hamza Derbas previously spent nine years at Apple and built his career in automotive and electric-vehicle engineering.
• Maven plans to build 250 third-generation robots and begin design on a fourth-generation platform.

Maven Robotics walked into its first serious sales meeting in 2024 with no working product, just, as CEO Hamza Derbas told TechCrunch, "a cartoon of a robot and a team of people." It still won the deal, beating four rival companies that already had robots on the floor.

Today Maven is coming out of stealth, the period when a startup keeps quiet while it builds, with a $100 million funding round behind it and robots running inside real warehouses.

What do these robots actually do?

They build mixed pallets, the wooden platforms stacked with boxed goods that move from factories to shops. A pallet arriving at a distribution centre might carry only one type of product. A retailer, however, wants a single delivery packed with many different items, matched to what shoppers are buying that week. Today, people walk the warehouse floor picking one box at a time. Maven's robots do that instead.

Each machine rolls on a wheeled base at up to 10 miles per hour, uses two arms fitted with vacuum suckers to pick and place boxes, and can shift loads up to 30 kilograms. Eight robots are currently running at customer sites, each working 16-hour shifts with 99% or higher uptime, meaning they almost never stop unexpectedly.

The company says its approach differs from single-task robots. One end of the system connects to a warehouse management platform, the software that tracks inventory. Finished pallets roll out the other end onto trucks. The robot handles everything in between.

Who is behind the company?

Derbas built his career in automotive engineering, with a focus on electric vehicles. Before Maven, he spent nine years at Apple, where he worked in the company's special projects group, widely reported to have been a self-driving car programme before Apple shut it down in 2024. His brother Khalid, who worked in private equity, joined as chief financial officer.

That self-driving car background shapes how Maven trains its robots. The team runs data from operating machines back into the system within hours, retrains the software, and redeploys, the same tight feedback loop that autonomous vehicle programmes spent years developing.

What does this mean for warehouse workers?

Maven frames its machines as taking over the repetitive physical work, the walking, lifting, and stacking, rather than replacing whole workforces overnight. The company is targeting palletisation first, which it estimates is an $80 billion market, then plans to move into broader material handling and eventually fabrication tasks.

Those future tasks require manipulation skills, the ability to handle irregular objects, that current robots cannot reliably perform. Maven is collecting more data and has built pincer-style gloves that let human workers demonstrate grip movements the robots can learn from.

A rival worth watching is Agility Robotics, which is going public in a $2.4 billion SPAC deal this autumn and focuses on industrial safety workflows. Agility's machines walk on two legs. Derbas, while expressing respect for the company, is direct about his view: wheeled arms are simpler, cheaper, and more reliable for the work his customers need done.

Common questions

Will these robots take warehouse jobs?

Maven's pitch is that it automates repetitive pallet-building tasks, not entire warehouses. Human workers remained on site in Maven's current customer facilities, visible on live video feeds at the company's Santa Clara office.

How far along is the technology?

The robots handle structured box-picking reliably today. Grasping irregular or soft materials is still a research problem Maven has not yet solved, and the company says openly that the next set of target tasks will require capabilities that do not yet exist.