Industrial robotics startup Maven Robotics Inc. launched today with $100 million in Series A funding, two years after it started working with its first customer.

Founded in 2024, the Santa Clara-based company began with mixed-case palletizing and tote handling, which Maven estimates to be an $80 billion market. The palletizing work involves building one store’s pallet from goods shipped in by several factories.

The mix changes with demand. “It’s all done with human labor today, running around the warehouse picking one of this, one of that,” co-founder and Chief Executive Hamza Derbas told TechCrunch.

Maven’s first customer, a large consumer goods company, was also talking to four rival robotics vendors in 2024, when the startup had what Derbas described as “a cartoon of a robot and a team of people.” Fleets now work autonomously across multiple shifts a day at a Fortune 250 consumer packaged goods company, and Derbas said as many as eight robots are deployed in total.

Uptime has been 99% or better over 16-hour working days, he said. Two vacuum-gripper arms lift up to 30 kilograms at a time from a wheeled base that can hit 10 miles per hour.

Maven bills the combined hardware, software and artificial intelligence system as general-purpose. Recent work has pushed into more complex material handling and assembly, where the company sees a market of more than $1 trillion. The new money will pay for 250 third-generation robots and early design work on a fourth, Derbas told TechCrunch.

The plan is to take on “one customer problem at a time,” Derbas said, on the view that each of those problems is its own multibillion-dollar market. Maven expects its robots to have logged more than 100,000 hours of autonomous operation by the end of the year and more than 1 million by the end of 2027.

Derbas spent nine years in Apple Inc.’s special projects group, and TechCrunch noted that the unit is widely thought to have been building a self-driving car before Apple disbanded it in 2024. His brother Khalid Derbas, now chief financial officer, came from private equity. Maven says the wider team includes veterans of Tesla Inc., Rivian Automotive Inc. and Zoox Inc.

RoboStrategy Inc., a closed-end robotics fund that listed on Nasdaq in May, led the round. Money also came from LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures LP and XTX Ventures, the venture investing arm of trading firm XTX Markets Ltd.

Jack Pearson, a principal at RoboStrategy, said there is “a huge gap between a robot that demos well and one that survives three production shifts a day, seven days a week.” Maven’s team has a record of shipping products, in his view, and built the robot to meet large enterprise requirements at scale.

Earlier backers had put $18 million into Maven before the Series A, according to PitchBook.

Image: Maven Robotics