toyota-ventures
(2)
Austin Oehlerking
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.
Jim Adler
Jim Adler is the Founder and General Partner of Toyota Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Toyota with $800M+ in assets under management and 90+ portfolio companies. A rocket-engineer-turned-serial-entrepreneur, Adler built the fund from a $100M seed in 2017 into a powerhouse backing frontier technologies in AI, autonomy, robotics, climate tech, and mobility. Known for his 'geek, suit, wonk' identity, he bridges deep technical expertise with sharp investment philosophy, insisting financial returns must precede strategic ones.