Abu Dhabi Investors Back Maven Robotics in $100m Physical AI Round
Zeta42 · 28 September 2026
Shorooq and Presight have joined a $100m Series A in Maven Robotics, a California maker of industrial robots. What it means for factories and warehouses in the Gulf.
Abu Dhabi investors join a $100m Series A
Shorooq, a regional multi-strategy investment firm, and Presight, the ADX-listed applied AI company majority-owned by Abu Dhabi-based G42, have invested in Maven Robotics, according to a press release published on Zawya. The investment was made through the Presight-Shorooq AI and Bedaya Funds managed by Shorooq, in a $100 million Series A alongside RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures.
Maven is not a Gulf company. It was founded in 2024, is based in Santa Clara, California, and is emerging from stealth with this financing. It builds wheeled, dual-armed robots for logistics and manufacturing, and the release describes it as building the first general-purpose robotics system. That is the release's own claim. Its starting point is much narrower: mixed-case palletising and tote handling, two workflows the release puts at an estimated $80 billion addressable market.
What the robots do today
The figures in the release are about operations. According to the release, its robots already run up to sixteen hours a day at customer sites with reliability above 99 per cent. It plans to build 250 of its third-generation machines, and the new capital will fund that fleet and the design of a fourth generation as the company moves from palletising towards broader materials handling. The release also says Maven has won work against rivals whose robots have been on the market for a long time.
The backers present this as the next stage of AI. "The first wave of AI reshaped how we work with information; the next will reshape how the physical economy runs, and that is a far larger prize," said Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq. Thomas Pramotedham, Chief Executive Officer of Presight, put it in operational terms: "AI creates value when it works reliably in the environments where businesses operate." Hamza Derbas, Maven's co-founder and chief executive, said the company is not racing to build the biggest model but to "solve industrial labour and make this work possible at the scale the world needs". He said the company sees the region as a node from which to take its robots global.
What it means for factories and warehouses here
Nothing in the release says Maven's robots are heading to Gulf warehouses. The regional story is the money, and what it is betting on. The release says Shorooq's thesis is to back companies moving artificial intelligence off the screen and into the physical world. Presight says it brings applied AI expertise and relationships, and the release points to access to G42's AI and compute ecosystem.
Baloch said Maven stands out because its team is "solving one industrial problem at a time, with the discipline and return-on-investment focus that real operators demand". That is the useful lesson for any factory or logistics operator in the UAE weighing automation. "General-purpose" is where Maven wants to end up. Its route there starts with one well-defined job, building mixed pallets, measured in hours of running time and reliability at customer sites.
That is how we approach industrial robotics at Zeta42 too. As DOBOT's partner for the UAE and the GCC, we time the job first, then supply the robot, integrate it and train the operators who will run it. The last step is the one most often underrated. A robot running sixteen hours a day needs people on site who can recover it after a stoppage and know when to halt it, which is why we run cobot operator workshops for factory teams.
If more Gulf capital follows Shorooq and Presight into physical AI, the skills question will arrive with it. Machines that move goods need people in the region who can deploy and maintain them.
Source: zawya.com
