Abu Dhabi's Shorooq and Presight Back Silicon Valley Robot Maker Maven in $100M Round

Abu Dhabi just placed a chip on the warehouse floor. Shorooq, the region's most active multi-strategy investment firm, and Presight, the applied-AI arm of G42, have taken part in a $100 million Series A for Maven Robotics — a Santa Clara startup that builds autonomous machines for logistics and manufacturing. The checks were written through the Presight–Shorooq AI and Bedaya funds, both managed by Shorooq. Neither investor disclosed its individual ticket.

The round also drew RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures, a syndicate that reads more Silicon Valley than Gulf. Maven was founded only in 2024, by Hamza Derbas, and already runs robots up to sixteen hours a day at customer sites with reliability above 99 percent — a figure that matters more in industrial sales than any demo reel. Its first targets are mixed-case palletising and tote handling, two unglamorous warehouse chores the company sizes as an $80 billion addressable market. The fresh capital will fund 250 of its third-generation machines and development of a fourth, as Maven pushes from palletising into broader materials handling.

For readers who track Gulf capital, the names on the ticket are the story. Shorooq is the Abu Dhabi firm that has spent a decade seeding founders across the Middle East, from fintech to logistics, and has increasingly written cheques into Silicon Valley from the Gulf rather than the other way around. Presight is the applied-AI company listed in Abu Dhabi and majority-owned by G42, the artificial-intelligence group at the centre of the UAE's push to convert oil wealth into compute, data centres and sovereign capability. Together they form a pairing Abu Dhabi has been assembling deliberately: one side brings investment discipline, the other brings applied AI expertise and access to one of the world's more significant AI and compute ecosystems.

That pairing is the real signal. Gulf capital has spent years buying stakes in American technology; what is changing is the pitch. "The first wave of AI reshaped how we work with information; the next will reshape how the physical economy runs, and that is a far larger prize," said Bilal Baloch, a partner at Shorooq, framing the bet as investing "from the region, for the world." Presight's chief executive, Thomas Pramotedham, put it in operational terms: AI creates value when it works reliably where businesses actually operate. For a region whose wealth still rests on moving barrels and containers, backing robots that move boxes is not a side quest. It is the sovereign-wealth playbook moving one layer deeper into the physical economy.

The deal also fits a wider pattern across the Gulf: national champions and state-linked funds acting as venture investors, using balance sheets and compute access as bait for founders who might otherwise stay in California. Maven keeps its headquarters in Santa Clara. The UAE gets a stake, a relationship and, potentially, a customer pipeline.

Watch what Maven does with the 250 machines. If they land in Gulf ports, fulfilment centres and factories, this round will look less like a financial investment and more like the first step in importing the next industrial revolution — and owning a piece of it.