Shorooq and Presight invest in Maven Robotics, as Gulf money bets on automating global factories
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Maven Robotics closed a Series A financing round of $100 million, notable that the two funds leading the investment from the region were Shorooq, a multi-strategy investment firm managing the Presight, Shorooq AI and Bidaya funds, and Presight, an applied-AI company under the UAE’s G42 group. They were joined by RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures, a lineup reflecting cross-continent confidence that intelligent industrial robots have reached commercial maturity.
A two-year-old company targeting an $80 billion market.
Maven was founded in 2024 by Hamza Darbas, based in Santa Clara, California. It began with two platforms: mixed-case palletising and tote handling, together representing an $80 billion market. Third-generation robots already operate up to sixteen hours a day at customer sites with reliability above 99 percent, and the new funding will be directed toward producing 250 units of this generation and designing a fourth generation that expands from palletising to broader material handling.
Capital alone is insufficient: the deliberate pairing of financing and capability
What distinguishes the deal is not just its size but its composition. Shorooq brings investment discipline and a track record of building companies, while Presight brings applied-AI expertise and access to one of the world’s largest computing and data infrastructures through G42. This pairing is designed to help portfolio companies scale faster than capital alone permits. Bilal Blous, a partner at Shorooq, said, "The first wave of AI reshaped how we work with information; the next wave will reshape how the physical economy works, and that prize is far larger."
From Abu Dhabi to Silicon Valley: investing at the region’s frontier for the world
Thomas Bramothdeam, Presight’s CEO, explained that "intelligence creates value when it operates reliably in the environments where companies work." Maven applies intelligence to the physical task of moving and processing goods, measuring performance by operational outcomes rather than research metrics. The joint fund Presight-Shorooq First Fund aims to support such companies with capital and relationship expertise that accelerate their rollout.
Hamza Darbas, co-founder and CEO of Maven, summed up the stance: "We are not in a race to build the largest model; we are in a race to solve the industrial labour problem and make this work possible at the scale the world needs." He added that the partnership brings a system of computing, data and institutional relationships that enable faster deployment and access to customers that would be difficult to reach alone, and the region sees a global launch hub for its robots.
What that means for those working in the Gulf
The deal charts a clear path: sovereign and private funds in the UAE and Saudi Arabia no longer stop at importing technologies, but are building investment and operational channels that link Silicon Valley innovations with regional computing capabilities and large-scale projects. For a robotics engineer or entrepreneur in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, the signal is clear: Gulf capital is looking for technologies that "take AI out of the screen and into the physical world," and anyone with a mature operational model in logistics or manufacturing will find an eager audience and financing accompanied by access to rare computing infrastructure.