JUST IN: @mavenrobotics just emerged from stealth with $100M raised, and the founding story is one of the best I've heard in robotics. In 2024, CEO @hamzaderbas had a cartoon of a robot and a team of people. He heard a large consumer goods company was in town meeting four rival robot companies about automation. He talked his way into the room, and instead of pitching, asked to visit their factories. He won the deal. Beating companies with actual robots. Two years later? Here is Maven building its own robots! 😮‍💨 The robots are wheeled, dual-arm platforms moving at 10 mph with 30 kg payload, built for mixed palletizing, one of the most labour-intensive tasks in warehouse logistics. Within 48 hours of goods hitting shelves, retailers want to change the mix based on real-time demand. Today that's all done by humans running around warehouses. Maven automates the whole thing end-to-end. The $100M round comes from @RoboStrategy, @localglobevc, Vine Ventures and XTX Markets. Plans? 250 third-gen robots and a fourth-gen platform in design. Derbas spent nine years at Apple's special projects group, widely believed to be the self-driving car programme, before founding Maven with his brother Khalid. His take on bipedal humanoids in warehouses is worth reading: "They make zero sense for anything they're doing. Very complex, unreliable, and add unnecessary cost. ROI is the name of the game." Harsh. But probably right for most industrial use cases today. Maven's thesis is to solve one customer problem at a time. Pick problems big enough that each one is a multi-billion-dollar market. Master the skills. Move to the next. Grounded. Profitable. Scaling. This is how you build a robotics company. 🔗 Here's a TechCrunch story: techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/ma… ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com