Press release:
Shorooq, the leading regional multi-strategy investment firm, and Presight, a global leader in applied AI for intelligent systems and a G42 company, have invested in Maven Robotics, an intelligent industrial robotics company building the first general-purpose robotics system. The investment was made through the Presight–Shorooq AI and Bedaya Funds managed by Shorooq, alongside RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures.
Founded in 2024 and based in Santa Clara, California, Maven designs, builds, and deploys intelligent robots for logistics and manufacturing. The company started with mixed-case palletizing and tote handling, two workflows that represent an estimated $80 billion addressable market. Maven’s robots already run up to sixteen hours a day at customer sites with reliability above 99 percent. The company plans to build 250 of its third-generation machines as it expands across a market for warehouse automation worth tens of billions of dollars.
Maven represents exactly the kind of company Shorooq was built to back: a founder tackling a real, physical problem at global scale, where applied intelligence turns automation from a research demo into working infrastructure. That thesis — backing the companies moving artificial intelligence off the screen and into the physical world — is what drew Shorooq to the deal.
“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. “What sets Maven apart is that Hamza and his team are not chasing a research benchmark — they are solving one industrial problem at a time, with the discipline and return-on-investment focus that real operators demand. Backing a company like this, from Abu Dhabi into Silicon Valley, is precisely what it means to invest in the frontier from the region, for the world.”
The investment also reflects a deliberate pairing of capital with capability. Where Shorooq brings the investment discipline and company-building track record, Presight brings deep expertise in applied intelligence and access to one of the most significant AI and compute ecosystems in the world through G42 — an advantage designed to help portfolio companies scale faster than capital alone would allow.
For Presight, the investment reflects its focus on applying intelligence to complex operational challenges. ”AI creates value when it works reliably in the environments where businesses operate,” said Thomas Pramotedham, Chief Executive Officer of Presight. “Maven is applying intelligence to the physical work of moving and handling goods, where performance is measured in operational results. Through the Presight–Shorooq Fund I, we aim to support companies like Maven with capital, applied AI expertise and relationships that can help them scale. This investment reflects our belief that the value of intelligence is realized through its application.”
Maven's approach has already won it work against rivals with robots long in the market, and its founding team draws on veterans of AI, robotics, engineering, and autonomous systems programmes — among the few groups to have solved the data pipelines that let hardware learn from real-world operation. The new capital will fund the build-out of its third-generation fleet and the design of a fourth, as the company moves from palletizing toward broader materials handling.
For Maven's founder, the backing brings partners who understand both the technology and the region's ambition to lead in it. “We're not in the race to build the biggest model — we're in the race to solve industrial labour and make this work possible at the scale the world needs,” said Hamza Derbas, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Maven Robotics. “Shorooq and Presight understood that from the first conversation. Beyond the capital, they bring an ecosystem — compute, data and enterprise relationships — that helps us deploy faster and reach customers we might not have reached alone. We also see the region a node from where we can take our robots global.”
The investment adds to a growing portfolio of frontier technology companies backed by Shorooq, which invests in category-defining artificial intelligence and deep-tech businesses worldwide and connects them to the capital, compute and enterprise networks of the UAE's AI ecosystem.