How Maven Robotics aims to automate industrial work, one task at a time

Since it was founded in 2024, Maven Robotics has created four iterations of its mobile manipulator, raised $100 million, and gone from early pilots to a manufacturing contract with its first customer. Its robots currently run 16 hours a day, five days a week, with uptime of up to 99%, according to Hamza Derbas, co-founder and CEO of Maven Robotics.

Maven moved quickly, raising Series A funding last month, but the Santa Clara, California-based company began its journey by focusing on the problems it wanted to solve.

“Maven started with a small group of people and together we started to look deeply at industrial work and realized that it faces a sad reality,” Derbas said The robot report. “The world needs more and more industrial production every day, but the workforce available to do this work is dwindling.”

Currently, there are more than half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the United States alone, and market analysts expect this number to grow into the millions in the coming years, Derbas said.

“At the same time, we noticed that the humanoid robotics companies, the ones with legs, were starting with the human form factor and trying to work backwards to get to a problem to solve,” he added. “That’s when it became very clear to us that there is a huge opportunity for the right kind of team, carrying with them all the battle scars of difficult construction technologies, to tackle this problem with a completely different approach, specifically geared towards enabling large-scale autonomous work in these environments.”

The use case informs the morphology, Derbas says

Right now, humanoids dominate conversations in the robotics industry. But legs aren’t the only way to create a multipurpose robot, Derbas noted.

“Instead of starting from a robot, a specific morphology or even a model, we started from the jobs to be done, down to the dust, dirt and grease on the factory floor,” he recalled. “So we turn to the robot, asking the question: What should our robot do? How far should it be able to go?”

One disadvantage of a wheeled robot is its bulk. A large, heavy base makes for a very stable robot, but is not realistic in all manufacturing or logistics facilities.

“We found a way to reduce the footprint so it can fit through doorways, really go anywhere, while still maintaining a very large dynamic range,” Derbas said. “We can reach the back of a 48-incher. [121.9 cm] pallet or deep in a storage rack up to 3 m [9.8 ft.] tall while carrying 30 kg [66.1 lb.] payloads”.

The Maven system as a whole is much more than just robots, which can collaborate autonomously with human workers or in fleets of robots. It also includes the ability to communicate with customer infrastructure, so you can exchange crucial information, as well as with the Maven network.

“[The Maven Network] it’s a global fabric of shared learning,” Derbas said. “If a robot makes a mistake somewhere in California, a robot in Japan can learn how to deal with that mistake the next day.”

Maven Robotics has collaborated with customers from the beginning

Early on, Derbas said Maven began working with a few partners to co-develop a general-purpose robot. These customers were willing to offer their in-depth operational knowledge to guide the system design.

“We didn’t just ask them to come and see our robots in our lab,” Derbas said. “We insisted on going out into the field, into the factory or warehouse, to watch people do the work and see where the friction is, and we focused very quickly on a couple of workstreams that we thought we could master quickly and scale up quickly.”

Maven’s first two workflows were mixed box palletizing and container handling. “These became the seed of our journey to generalization, as we began to implement them and create value for our customers, opening up a broader conversation,” Derbas said. “What if our robots could acquire more and more skills faster and faster?”

Maven has worked with its customers to create a roadmap of use cases and a progressive approach to implementing automation. The company uses its robots to automate a task and improve operations as it learns from that implementation. When the mobile manipulator masters the skill, the client increases this implementation. Then, Maven starts working on the next task.

“By doing this iteration, we gain customer trust for rapid deployment and learn from the real world instead of the lab, and unlock this data flywheel so we can train increasingly general models for increased intelligence and over the long term,” Derbas said.

The road to generalization

Looking ahead, Maven Robotics plans to tackle the assembly and manufacturing of durable goods. This would allow its robots to build cars, ships, planes, and even other robots in the future.

“Industrial work is not for the faint of heart,” Derbas said. “The level of reliability is very high. There is less demand for wanting a robot to be perfectly generalizable in its intelligence on day one. Generalization is a journey; reliability is not. It is required from day one.”

To handle a variety of tasks, Maven has equipped its robots with a modular end-of-arm interface so it can adapt different grippers to the job at hand. Derbas said the company has landed on two types of grippers, a vacuum-suction gripper and a parallel gripper with two fingers.

“We started with standard calipers, they didn’t work well,” he said. “We ended up designing our own gripper, then iterated on it. Now we’ve landed on an extremely capable, miniaturized vacuum gripper.”

The team experimented a lot when it came to multi-finger tools. Derbas said Maven examined five-, four- and three-fingered grippers with different sensing and actuation methods.

“We realized that the hand itself doesn’t need to have that much actuation or degrees of freedom, because if you take advantage of the fact that the hands are placed on seven degrees of freedom arms and we have two arms with seven degrees of freedom, the extra articulation and maneuverability that you get can help simplify the gripper,” he said. “Combined with the right intelligence, you can achieve a lot.”

Maven Robotics seeks to increase deployments

Maven Robotics is working to scale up its deployments and run its robots for more hours. Derbas said the company plans to operate its fleets 24 hours a day, seven days a week before the end of the year. The company offers its robots as a service (RaaS).

“We went from zero to manufacturing contracts to long-term contracts with recurring revenue in about two years,” Derbas said. “We will have a couple of hundred robots under production contracts over the next year, and hopefully that will become thousands by 2028 as we prepare for mass production.”

For mass production, Derbas said there are three main areas the company will focus on: streamlining how it produces the robot’s mechanical and structural components, working with suppliers to reduce the cost of actuators, and eliminating redundancy in the robot’s electronic systems.