Maven Robotics raises $100M Series A as Shorooq and Presight back its warehouse robots

Shorooq and Presight invested through the Presight–Shorooq AI Fund and the Bedaya Fund, both managed by Shorooq. RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures also took part. The announcement did not name a lead investor, say how much each backer put in or give Maven's valuation.

Maven will use the money to build 250 of its third-generation robots, design a fourth generation and expand from palletising into wider materials handling.

Maven is starting with palletising, one of the warehouse's most repetitive jobs

Maven's robots are wheeled, have two arms and are built to carry out an industrial task from start to finish. Its first two workflows are mixed-case palletising, which means stacking boxes of different sizes onto a single pallet, and tote handling. Maven estimates the two have an $80 billion addressable market.

The company says its robots run up to 16 hours a day at customer sites with reliability above 99%, and that it has won business against rivals whose robots have been on sale for longer. Its founding team comes from AI, robotics, engineering and autonomous systems programmes. Maven says the team has built the data pipelines that let its robots learn from real-world operation.

"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," said Hamza Derbas, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Maven Robotics.

Shorooq and Presight are offering G42's compute alongside their cash

"The first wave of AI reshaped how we work with information; the next will reshape how the physical economy runs, and that is a far larger prize," said Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq. "What sets Maven apart is that Hamza and his team are not chasing a research benchmark. They are solving one industrial problem at a time, with the discipline and return-on-investment focus that real operators demand."

Shorooq manages the two funds and contributes investment and company-building experience. Presight contributes applied AI expertise and access to compute from its parent company, G42. The investors say this combination should help portfolio companies scale faster than funding alone would.

"AI creates value when it works reliably in the environments where businesses operate," said Thomas Pramotedham, Chief Executive Officer of Presight. "Maven is applying intelligence to the physical work of moving and handling goods, where performance is measured in operational results. Through the Presight–Shorooq Fund I, we aim to support companies like Maven with capital, applied AI expertise and relationships that can help them scale."

"Shorooq and Presight understood that from the first conversation. Beyond the capital, they bring an ecosystem of compute, data and enterprise relationships that helps us deploy faster and reach customers we might not have reached alone," Derbas said. "We also see the region as a node from which we can take our robots global."

Maven's reliability and market figures still come only from the company

The $80 billion market estimate and the 99% reliability figure are Maven's own, and the company has not named any customers or disclosed revenue. Its fourth-generation robot is still only a design.

For Shorooq, the deal puts Abu Dhabi money into a US hardware company at Series A. "Backing a company like this, from Abu Dhabi into Silicon Valley, is precisely what it means to invest in the frontier from the region, for the world," Baloch said.

Shorooq was founded in 2017 and is regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority. It invests across venture capital, credit, private equity and real assets, and backs AI and deep-tech companies worldwide.