
The Apkudo revenue chief works in the unglamorous, consequential minutes after a phone is returned - when data, trust and a second life are all still up for grabs.

He began with a humanoid, two suitcases of electronics and an impatience with theory. Now the GreyOrange co-founder is betting that the useful future of AI will be measured in shelves moved, orders shipped and decisions made on the warehouse floor.
Austin Oehlerking is the co-founder and CEO of Boxbot, an Alameda, California robotics company reinventing how parcels are stored, sorted, and sequenced inside the supply chain. A mechanical engineer trained at MIT with a Harvard MBA, he cut his teeth building electric vehicles at Arcimoto and Tesla before starting Boxbot in 2016 as a self-driving last-mile delivery venture. When customers proved more excited about the box-handling robot than the delivery van, Oehlerking pivoted the company toward AI-driven, high-density parcel storage, turning the flat conveyor belt into a three-dimensional machine. Boxbot has raised roughly $28-29.5M from Playground Global, Toyota Ventures, Maersk Growth, Pear Ventures, and Artiman Ventures.