warehouse-automation
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Ken Ramoutar Wants the Warehouse to Listen Better
After a career translating complex enterprise technology into customer value, the Lucas Systems CMO has fixed his attention on a stubbornly physical problem: making warehouse work easier, smarter and more adaptable.
Aiden Kim Built a Drone for the Places GPS Forgot
The B GARAGE founder spent years studying decisions under uncertainty. Then he turned that training toward a stubborn warehouse problem: knowing what is actually on the shelves.
Zakariea Sharfeddine
Zakariea Sharfeddine is the co-founder and CEO of InLoop Robotics (YC P26), a startup building AI-native warehouse fulfillment powered by robotic arms you hire by the month. A KIT-trained informatics engineer who did machine learning work at Bosch and BMW and reinforcement learning research at RoboTUM, he now leads a team deploying bimanual robots that pack, kit, and fulfill orders, with remote human operators stepping in on edge cases so the line never stops.
Jeff Cardenas
Jeff Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Apptronik, an Austin-based robotics company building Apollo, a general-purpose AI-powered humanoid robot. He spun the company out of the University of Texas Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 and has since raised close to $1 billion, secured a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics, and positioned the company among the small handful of credible US humanoid players. He frames the race to build practical humanoids as the 'space race of our time.'
Andrew Meyer
Andrew (AJ) Meyer is the founder and CEO of Pickle Robot Company, a Boston-area startup building Physical AI robots that autonomously unload trucks. An MIT-trained engineer and serial founder, he watched fifteen people unload trailers on a freezing UPS night shift in 2018 and decided robots should do that job. Pickle's one-armed machines now pick boxes up to 50 pounds at speeds reaching 1,500 boxes an hour for customers like UPS and Yusen Logistics. In late 2024 the company closed a $50 million Series B, bringing total funding past $114 million.
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.
Jackie Wu
Jackie Wu is the founder and CEO of Corvus Robotics, a company that builds fully autonomous drones that fly indoors and count warehouse inventory without beacons, GPS, Wi-Fi, or a human at the controls. A Northwestern-trained roboticist who spent time inside warehouses on four continents, he grew tired of watching people climb ladders with clipboards and barcode guns, and decided to teach a drone to do it instead. Corvus designs and manufactures its drones in California, went through Y Combinator, and raised a Series A in 2024 to push warehouses toward a lights-out future.
Mark Messina
Mark Messina is Managing Director and CEO of ANSCER Robotics Americas, the U.S. arm of a Bengaluru-based hybrid autonomous mobile robot company. With more than 25 years across engineering, manufacturing and operations, he helped build the modern warehouse-robot industry from the inside - joining Amazon during the Kiva Systems acquisition, later working on Amazon Prime Air drones, IoT at Mattel, and leading U.S. expansions for Geek+ and Addverb. He now runs ANSCER's Austin, Texas headquarters, championing a frugal, ROI-first approach to robotics and a Robots-as-a-Service model built to put automation within reach of small operators.
Marc Gyoengyoesi
Marc Gyoengyoesi is the founder and CEO of OneTrack.AI, a Chicago company that puts AI cameras on forklifts to give warehouses the kind of real-time visibility that factory floors take for granted. He started out building autonomous inventory drones at Northwestern's startup incubator as Intelligent Flying Machines, crashed one on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in front of 2,500 people, picked up 12 stitches from another crash in development, and concluded that the cameras mattered more than the things flying them. Today OneTrack runs on deep learning, computer vision and distributed computing across trillions of images, turning forklift footage into safety alerts, shipment validation and operational intelligence.
Tom Dean
Tom Dean is the co-founder, President and CEO of Renaissant, a Milwaukee-based logistics technology company building a voice-enabled, agentic AI operating system for warehouse yards and loading docks. A former Ernst & Young auditor turned hedge fund trader and investment manager, Dean pivoted Renaissant from a building-security platform into freight tech, raised a $5 million Series A in 2024, and now runs software across roughly 130 sites that talks to truck drivers in their own language to speed check-ins, deter cargo theft, and cut idle time.
Chris Walti
Chris Walti is co-founder and CEO of Mytra, the Brisbane, CA-based robotics company rebuilding industrial material flow from the software up. Before founding Mytra in 2022, he spent 7.5 years at Tesla leading Model 3 material flow engineering, building the company's internal mobile robotics team, and becoming the first lead of what would become the Optimus humanoid robot program. Mytra has since raised $198M in total funding including a $120M Series C in January 2026, and its 3D robotic storage systems are deployed at Albertsons distribution centers, delivering up to 88% labor hour savings versus conventional solutions.
SK Ganapathi
Dr. Srinivasan 'KG' Ganapathi is the founder and CEO of Vimaan Robotics, a Silicon Valley AI company deploying computer vision and machine learning to bring 100% inventory accuracy to warehouses. A serial entrepreneur with nearly 50 patents spanning magnetic recording, MEMS sensors, and supply chain digitization, Ganapathi previously founded Fidelica Microsystems (acquired by Lenovo) and Verreon Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm). With Vimaan, he is transforming how the world's largest 3PLs, retailers, and Fortune 10 companies track goods from dock to shelf - and became the first computer vision startup to receive investment from Amazon's $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund.
Arshan Poursohi
Arshan Poursohi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Third Wave Automation, a Union City, California-based robotics company building autonomous high-reach forklifts powered by a proprietary Shared Autonomy Platform. Drawing on research stints at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Google Robotics, and Toyota Research Institute, Poursohi co-founded Third Wave in 2018 with the conviction that warehouse automation should enhance - not replace - human judgment. The company has raised over $82 million from investors including Woven Capital (Toyota's growth fund), Norwest Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors, Qualcomm Ventures, and Zebra Technologies, and its TWA Reach forklifts now operate commercially in warehouses across the U.S.
Ritesh Ragavender
Ritesh Ragavender is the Founder and CEO of Reflex Robotics, a New York-based startup building affordable, general-purpose wheeled humanoid robots for warehouse and logistics operations. A former MIT student with roots in quantitative finance and a prior YCombinator-backed startup, Ragavender launched Reflex in 2022 with a team drawn from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Anduril, and Oculus. The company raised a $7M seed round led by Khosla Ventures in 2024 and has since partnered with GXO Logistics - the world's largest pure-play contract logistics provider - for live warehouse deployments. Reflex's robots aim to be 20x cheaper than competing humanoids, combining AI policies that improve with every shift with human-in-the-loop remote supervision.
Thomas Tang
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.
Anthony Jules
Anthony Jules is the Co-founder and CEO of Robust.AI, a San Carlos, California company building AI-powered collaborative robots for warehouse and logistics operations. A 30-year technology veteran originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Jules began coding at age 11, earned degrees in Computer Science from MIT, and helped scale Sapient Corporation from 3 to 4,000 employees. After co-founding Redwood Robotics (acquired by Google), he led robotics product programs at Google X's Everyday Robot project, then co-founded Robust.AI in 2019 alongside robotics legend Rodney Brooks. The company's Carter robot - which uses eight cameras and no lidar - achieved a 60% productivity increase at DHL Supply Chain on day one, and recently partnered with Foxconn for manufacturing scale-up.
Brad Porter
Brad Porter is the Founder and CEO of Collaborative Robotics (Cobot), a Santa Clara-based startup building AI-powered collaborative robots designed to work alongside humans rather than replace them. After 14 years at Amazon — where he rose to VP of Robotics and Distinguished Engineer, deploying over 250,000 robots — Porter left to briefly serve as CTO at Scale AI before founding Cobot in May 2022. In under three years, he raised $140M in funding (including a $100M Series B led by General Catalyst in April 2024), launched the Proxie robot in November 2024, and signed customers including Mayo Clinic, Maersk, Moderna, and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Simon Kalouche
Simon Kalouche is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a San Francisco-based robotics company that builds fully autonomous AI-powered fulfillment centers. A mechanical engineering graduate of Ohio State and robotics master's graduate of Carnegie Mellon, Kalouche invented the first low-cost quasi-direct-drive actuators in 2016 - a breakthrough that catalyzed robots from MIT's Mini Cheetah to Tesla Optimus. He left his Stanford PhD under Fei-Fei Li to commercialize the technology and has since built Nimble into a billion-dollar company with $231M in total funding, a landmark FedEx partnership, and a board that includes Marc Raibert (Boston Dynamics founder) and Sebastian Thrun (Google X founder).
Sam Lurye
Sam Lurye is the founder and CEO of Kargo, a San Francisco-based industrial AI company that installs computer-vision towers at warehouse loading docks to automatically capture, verify, and digitize freight data in real time. A Stanford electrical engineering dropout, Lurye left campus in 2019 after touring factories across the US and spotting a universal blind spot: every warehouse still tracked its most important physical transactions - trucks arriving, pallets moving, damages happening - on paper and memory. Kargo has since deployed over 1,000 sensor towers, grown its enterprise customer base from 3 to 45+ (including Mercedes-Benz, Tillamook, and Aurobindo), tripled annual revenue from 2024 to 2025, and raised a $42M Series B in December 2025.