Shorooq and Presight back Maven Robotics in $100 million Series A

Shorooq and Presight, a G42 company, have backed Maven Robotics in a $100 million Series A. The two Abu Dhabi investors took part through funds managed by Shorooq, among them the Presight–Shorooq AI fund and Bedaya. RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures also joined the round. Neither Shorooq nor Presight disclosed the size of its own commitment.

Maven was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It builds autonomous robots for logistics and manufacturing, starting with mixed-case palletising and tote handling, two workflows the company estimates represent an $80 billion addressable market. Its machines run as long as sixteen hours a day at customer sites, with reliability above 99 percent. Maven plans to build 250 of its third-generation robots.

The capital pays for that production run and for design work on a fourth generation, as Maven widens its focus from palletising into materials handling more broadly. The company is chasing a warehouse automation market it values in the tens of billions of dollars, and says it has already won work against rivals whose robots have been on the market longer.

For Shorooq and Presight, the deal fits a shared thesis: fund companies that apply artificial intelligence to physical and industrial operations, and give them a route into the UAE's AI, compute and enterprise ecosystem. The pair describe the arrangement as capital paired with capability. Shorooq contributes investment discipline and a company-building record, while Presight contributes applied AI expertise and access to G42's compute and AI infrastructure — an advantage the investors expect to help portfolio companies scale faster than money alone would.

Bilal Baloch, a partner at Shorooq, said the coming phase of AI will reorganise the physical economy rather than information work, and that this is the larger prize. He said Maven stands out because Hamza Derbas and his team are not chasing research benchmarks but solving industrial problems one at a time, with the discipline and return-on-investment focus operators demand. Backing a company like this from Abu Dhabi into Silicon Valley, he said, is what frontier investing from the region looks like.

Thomas Pramotedham, Presight's chief executive, said AI creates value when it works reliably in the environments where businesses operate. He described Maven as applying intelligence to the physical work of moving and handling goods, where performance is measured in operational results. Capital, applied AI expertise and relationships that help companies scale, he said, are what the fund aims to provide.

Derbas said Maven is not in a race to build the largest model but to address industrial labour needs and make the work possible at the scale the world requires. He said the two investors understood that early, and that beyond money they bring compute, data and enterprise relationships that speed deployment and reach customers Maven might not have found alone. The region, he added, is a node from which the company can take its robots global.

The investment adds to a portfolio of AI and deep-tech companies Shorooq backs worldwide and links to UAE capital, compute and enterprise networks. Maven's nearer task is narrower: finish the third-generation fleet, with a fourth in design.