Plenty of robotics startups promise to automate everything at once. Santa Clara-based Maven Robotics is going the other way. It picks one industrial task, gets a robot to do it reliably on a real production floor, and then moves on to the next one. That approach has now been backed by a $100 million Series A, announced on September 10, 2026, and the company is turning its attention to building its mobile manipulator in volume.
The round was led by RoboStrategy, with LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures among the other investors. Maven was founded in 2024 by brothers Hamza Derbas (CEO) and Khalid Derbas (CFO). Hamza previously worked as an engineer in Apple’s special projects group, and Khalid comes from private equity. In about two years the team has built four iterations of its robot and gone from early pilots to production contracts.
The hardware
Maven’s robot is a wheeled mobile manipulator with two arms. It was designed to slot into existing facilities rather than force a factory to rebuild around it. The headline specs:
- Dual seven-degree-of-freedom arms
- A small footprint that fits through doorways
- A maximum reach of 3 meters (9.8 feet) on 48-inch pallets
- A 30 kg (66.1 lb) payload
- Travel speeds of up to 10 miles per hour
- Custom vacuum and parallel two-finger grippers on a modular end-of-arm interface
That interchangeable tooling is what makes the step-by-step plan possible. The same base and arms can take on a new job by changing the gripper and the software, with no need to design a new machine.
Already on shift
The robots aren’t confined to a lab. Maven’s fleet works at a Fortune 250 consumer packaged goods company, and TechCrunch reported that eight units were running 16-hour shifts there. The Robot Report puts the schedule at 16 hours a day, five days a week, with 99% uptime on production units. The first jobs are mixed-case palletizing and tote handling. Maven estimates that market at around $80 billion.
Next on the list are more complex material handling and assembly, plus fabrication of durable goods for the automotive, aerospace and marine industries. The company puts that broader opportunity at more than $1 trillion. Explaining the pitch, Hamza Derbas said: “We’re not trying to solve a single robot problem. We’re trying to autonomously take on the task end to end.”
Robots as a service, at scale
Maven doesn’t sell its machines outright. It rents them under a Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, so customers pay for completed work instead of buying hardware. The company’s targets are ambitious:
- 24/7 operations by the end of 2026
- Over 100,000 autonomous hours by the end of 2026 and 1,000,000 hours by the end of 2027
- Several hundred robots on production contracts within a year
- Thousands of robots deployed by 2028
The argument behind it is mostly about people. “The world needs more and more industrial output every day, but the workforce available to do this work is dwindling,” Derbas said. Maven’s bet is that a dependable two-armed robot that learns one job at a time will scale faster than a do-everything humanoid that is still waiting for its first real shift.
