Shorooq and Presight take a slice of US robotics startup Maven’s USD 100 mn round

Abu Dhabi-based investment firm Shorooq and G42-owned Presight have invested in Santa Clara-based Maven Robotics, according to a statement (pdf). The investment was made through two Shorooq-managed vehicles: the Presight-Shorooq AI and Bedaya funds. The size of their ticket wasn’t disclosed.

This isn’t a new round: Maven emerged from stealth on 10 September with a USD 100 mn Series A led by RoboStrategy, with LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Ventures participating. The Abu Dhabi investors were among the unnamed “others” at the time. The new capital will fund 250 third-generation robots and the design of a fourth-generation platform.

About Maven: Founded in 2024 by brothers Hamza (LinkedIn) and Khalid Derbas (LinkedIn), Maven builds wheeled, two-armed robots for warehouses and factories. It started with mixed-case palletizing — rebuilding a single store’s pallet from goods shipped in by several factories, work that’s still done manually — and tote handling, which it estimates is a USD 80 bn market. It’s still early days: as many as eight robots are deployed at a Fortune 250 consumer goods company. Maven says they run 16-hour shifts at 99%+ uptime.

About the funds: Presight and Shorooq launched the USD 100 mn Presight-Shorooq Fund I in September 2025, hosted in ADGM, pitching startups on access to Presight’s compute, GPU resources, and secure data environments alongside capital. The fund planned to back 25-30 AI and deep tech startups and hold 40% of its capital in reserve for follow-on rounds. It invested in five companies within its first 120 days — Nodeshift, Candid, Hebbia, Blue, and Crunched — co-investing alongside firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and GV. Meanwhile, Bedaya Fund II, which targeted USD 150 mn, was set up to back pre-seed to Series A startups across MENAP, primarily in fintech, software, platforms, and digital assets.