In 2024, Maven Robotics was just getting started, with only a cartoon of a robot and a team of people as its initial assets, according to CEO and co-founder Hamza Derbas, who spoke with TechCrunch. Instead of pushing his ideas about robotics, Derbas reached out to a major consumer goods company with logistics needs and asked to visit their factories and warehouses. “We saw how people were working; we zeroed in on flows we could immediately bring value to,” he said. “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.” This approach helped Maven win the deal over companies with existing robotics solutions. After two years of collaboration with that company and others, Maven now has up to eight robots working 16 hours a day, with 99% or higher uptime. Maven recently emerged from stealth mode after raising $100 million in funding from investors including RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Markets Ventures. The company plans to build 250 of its third-generation robots and begin designing a fourth-generation platform. Their robots are mounted on wheeled bases, capable of moving at 10 miles per hour, and have two arms that can lift up to 30 kilograms. Their main task is “mixed palletizing,” which involves assembling new pallets from goods arriving from different factories to be sent to stores. This process needs to be flexible, as stores often want to change the mix of products based on real-time demand. Today, this is done manually, with workers running around the warehouse to pick items. At Maven’s facility in Santa Clara, the robots move smoothly through a training area, using vacuum suction to pick up and arrange boxes at a reasonable pace. A live video screen shows two robots working at a customer site, with employees walking around them. Derbas previously worked in automotive engineering, focusing on electric vehicles, and spent nine years at Apple, where he was part of a special project group that many believe was working on a self-driving car before it was shut down in 2024. He co-founded Maven with his brother, Khalid, who now serves as the company’s CFO after a career in private equity. Maven’s approach is grounded in the realities of industrial operations, setting it apart from other robotics firms. Jack Pearson, an investor at RoboStrategy, noted that Maven’s background in industrial systems, rather than a research culture focused on learning or specific architectures, is a key differentiator. While Agility, another robotics company preparing for an IPO, is similarly focused on industrial workflows, its two-legged robots are seen by Derbas as overly complex, unreliable, and costly. “ROI is the name of the game here,” he said. As Maven looks to grow beyond its current workflows, it will need to develop a research culture to tackle more complex tasks. While palletization is an $80 billion market, the next set of tasks the company is targeting will require robotic manipulation capabilities that don’t yet exist. Maven plans to collect more data and train its robots to handle various materials, aiming toward automation and fabrication. The company will use its own systems, third-party providers, and has even developed pincer-like gloves to help humans emulate the form factor of their grippers. While Maven bills itself as a maker of general-purpose robots, its strategy is to tackle one task at a time. “We’re grounded in solving one customer problem at a time,” Derbas said. “If you focus on solving problems and you pick sizeable problems, each problem is a multi-billion-dollar market. If you do that, there’s plenty of data to master these skills.” This approach might be the most viable path to integrating robots into the workplace—or it could be overtaken by the next powerful physical AI model developed in research labs. “We’re not in the race for models—we’re in the race to solve industrial labor and make this work possible at the scale the world needs,” Derbas told TechCrunch.