YAKUB ABDULRASHEED – UAE-based investment firm Shorooq and Presight, an applied artificial intelligence company within G42, have invested in US industrial robotics startup Maven Robotics as part of its $100 million Series A funding round.
This aims to back the company’s ambition to bring intelligent automation deeper into warehouses and manufacturing environments.
Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Maven develops autonomous robots capable of handling physical tasks including mixed-case palletising and tote handling.
The company says its machines can already operate for up to 16 hours a day at customer sites with reliability above 99%.
The new funding will support production of its third-generation robot fleet and development of a fourth generation as Maven broadens its focus beyond palletising.
As Shorooq Partner Bilal Baloch put it, “the next” wave of AI will reshape “how the physical economy runs.”
Targeting the next phase of industrial AI
The investment was made through the Presight–Shorooq AI and Bedaya Funds managed by Shorooq, alongside RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures. The individual amounts invested by Shorooq and Presight were not disclosed.
The deal nevertheless places UAE-backed capital behind a company pursuing what investors see as a major transition in artificial intelligence, that is, moving AI from primarily digital environments into physical operations.
Maven’s technology is designed to allow robots to perceive and respond to changing industrial conditions while performing repetitive materials-handling tasks.
For Shorooq, the investment reflects its strategy of backing AI and deep-tech companies that can apply intelligence to real-world industrial problems.
“The first wave of AI reshaped how we work with information; the next will reshape how the physical economy runs,” Baloch said, highlighting the investment thesis behind the deal.
What Maven Robotics is building
Founded by Hamza Derbas in 2024, Maven Robotics designs, builds and deploys intelligent robots for logistics and manufacturing. Its initial focus is on mixed-case palletising and tote handling, activities that require machines to identify, pick up, move and arrange goods in busy industrial environments.
Unlike conventional automation systems designed around highly repetitive and narrowly defined movements, Maven is pursuing a more flexible robotics system that can be adapted to different physical tasks.
The company estimates that its initial applications represent an $80 billion addressable market. Maven also says its robots are already operating at customer sites for as many as 16 hours daily, with reliability above 99%.
Its longer-term objective is to expand from palletising into broader materials-handling applications, making its machines useful across a wider range of warehouse and industrial workflows.
Funding to expand robot production and capabilities
The fresh capital is expected to help Maven make the transition from developing and deploying individual robotic systems to producing a larger fleet for commercial use.
The company plans to build 250 third-generation machines while simultaneously designing its fourth-generation platform.
This expansion is particularly significant because industrial robotics requires more than developing software or demonstrating a prototype; companies must manufacture reliable machines capable of functioning continuously in demanding real-world environments.
Maven’s leadership says its technology has already secured work against competitors with robots that have been on the market for considerably longer.
The company also draws on a founding team with experience across artificial intelligence, robotics, engineering and autonomous systems.
According to Maven, its team includes people who have worked on the data pipelines required for hardware to learn from real-world operations.
Why Shorooq and Presight are investing
For Shorooq, Maven represents an opportunity to back a company addressing a tangible industrial problem rather than simply pursuing an experimental AI demonstration.
Baloch said Maven’s founders were “not chasing a research benchmark” but were instead solving industrial problems with a focus on the return on investment demanded by real operators.
Presight brings a complementary capability through its experience in applied AI and its connection to the wider G42 technology ecosystem.
Presight CEO Thomas Pramotedham said the investment reflects the company’s belief that “AI creates value when it works reliably in the environments where businesses operate.”
In practical terms, the partnership combines investment capital with potential access to AI expertise, computing resources, data and enterprise relationships.
The investors believe this combination could help Maven accelerate deployments and expand into new markets.
Maven’s ambition to take physical AI global
For Maven founder and CEO Hamza Derbas, the partnership represents more than access to funding.
He said Shorooq and Presight understood from their first conversation that Maven’s objective was to solve industrial labour challenges rather than compete solely in the race to develop increasingly large AI models.
“We’re not in the race to build the biggest model, we’re in the race to solve industrial labour and make this work possible at the scale the world needs,” Derbas said.
He also pointed to the strategic value of the UAE connection, saying the investors bring an ecosystem involving “compute, data and enterprise relationships” that could help the company deploy faster and reach customers it might not otherwise have reached.
Maven’s stated ambition is therefore not limited to the US warehouse market. With additional capital, a growing robot fleet and access to international technology and enterprise networks, the company is positioning its robotics platform for broader global deployment.
AI moves from digital tools to physical infrastructure
The Maven investment illustrates a broader shift in the AI industry towards technologies capable of interacting directly with the physical economy.
While much of the recent AI boom has centred on software capable of processing information, generating content and assisting knowledge-based work, robotics companies are attempting to apply similar intelligence to machines that operate in warehouses, factories and other physical environments.
Maven’s approach represents this transition by combining AI with autonomous machines capable of handling goods in changing industrial settings.
Shorooq described this direction as moving “artificial intelligence off the screen and into the physical world.”
For Maven, the immediate opportunity lies in warehouse automation, but its longer-term expansion into broader materials handling could expose the technology to additional industrial applications.
The $100 million Series A therefore gives the startup substantial resources to test whether intelligent robotics can scale from specialised warehouse tasks into a wider layer of automated industrial infrastructure.
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