Maven Robotics.

Maven Robotics is building a new kind of working robot, a general-purpose machine that is purpose-built for industry. The company describes it as combining strength, adaptive dexterity, fluid mobility, and what it calls the most reliable physical AI. Its customer is manufacturing and logistics, where the work is physical and repetitive, and most of it is still done by hand.

The company is based in Silicon Valley, and the team is small. Its engineers and scientists come from Apple, Tesla, Cruise, Boeing, Ford, Rivian, and McLaren Racing, with roots at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and Harvard. Maven is already working with some of the largest global manufacturing and logistics organizations, and it says the goal is automation that businesses of every scale can afford.

What they're building

Maven is building the whole machine, from the hardware and software through to the AI that runs it. The robot is designed to work safely alongside people and to compete on cost rather than novelty. Open roles describe the stack plainly: mechanical and compute hardware, real-time embedded software, foundation models, perception and manipulation, motion planning and controls, and data collection operators. That last role matters. General-purpose manipulation is a data problem as much as a modeling problem, and Maven is staffing for it.

Why we backed the founders and team

Industrial robotics is hard in the ways we look for. The demo is the easy part; the product is uptime, safety, cost per task, and a robot that runs the second shift the same as the first. Maven is taking on mechanical hardware, compute, real-time software, and learned manipulation all at once, because in this category integration is the advantage. You cannot buy your way to a working robot. It has to be assembled.

Physical labor is one of the largest markets there is, and industry is where the willingness to pay already exists. We backed Maven because the team has shipped hardware at companies that punish sloppiness, and because they are pointed at work measured in throughput rather than applause. Most of what comes next will not be announcements. We are comfortable with that.