Focus Area
Robotics
Autonomy and automation for industry and defense. The fund backs machines that do physical work — the platform, the autonomy on top of it, and the integration, service and safety engineering that carry a robot out of a pilot cell and onto a site where downtime is counted in money.
What we back.
- Industrial and field platforms
- Mobile robots, manipulators and purpose-built machines for warehouses, yards, plants, farms, construction sites and inspection work — measured on uptime, cycle time and the labor the machine actually removes rather than on what it does in a demonstration.
- Autonomy in the open world
- Navigation, perception and planning for machines that work without a map, a satellite fix or a continuous link, and that hand control back cleanly when they reach the edge of what they can do rather than failing somewhere a person has to recover them.
- Manipulation and end effectors
- Grippers, tooling, force control and the calibration behind them — the part of a robot that decides whether it can handle the variation of real parts, real produce and real packaging rather than a fixture built for the pilot.
- Fleet software, teleoperation and safety
- Remote supervision, fleet orchestration, and the safety case, monitoring and service model that let one operator stand behind many machines. This is usually where the economics of a robotics company are won or lost.
Why now
Why this sector, in this corridor, now.
The components stopped being the hard part. Actuators, compute, batteries and sensing are cheap enough and good enough that the bottleneck has moved to integration, reliability and service — the long stretch between a working demonstration and a machine someone leaves running overnight. That is unglamorous engineering, which is exactly why it defends a company: a competitor can buy the same parts and still be two years away from the same uptime.
Labor is the other half of it. Operators across the United States, the UAE and MENA cannot staff the shifts they already have in ports, logistics, construction, agriculture and inspection, and are now buying machines to do work rather than buying automation as a program. In the region that demand often arrives with a facility being built from scratch, which means a machine can be designed into the site instead of retrofitted around it.
What we look for
What a company in this area has to show.
The five criteria in How We Invest apply to every opportunity. These are the questions this area adds on top of them.
Work removed, in the customer's own units
Pallets moved, meters inspected, hectares covered, hours of labor released — set against the cost of the machine, its service and the person still supervising it. A company that reports demonstrations rather than throughput has not been deployed yet.
Uptime, service and the cost of a site visit
Time between interventions, who performs them, how far they travel and what a replacement part costs. Field service quietly sets gross margin in this sector; it is designed deliberately or it is discovered in the second year.
A safety case the site will accept
The standards the installation falls under, how the machine behaves when a sensor fails or a person walks into its envelope, and the evidence the customer's own safety team will ask for before it runs anywhere near people.
Hardware economics that improve with volume
A bill of materials with a credible path down, a manufacturing route someone other than the founders can run, and an honest account of which parts are still hand-built and which supplier could not be replaced quickly.
Across the corridor
Why the corridor matters here.
Robotics travels badly as a product and well as a deployment. A machine that works in one warehouse does not automatically work in the next one, so what the corridor is worth here is a second site — different labor, different conditions, a different operator — that proves the system generalizes rather than fits. The United States has the deepest autonomy engineering and the most demanding early customers. The UAE and the wider MENA region have ports, logistics operators, construction programs and industrial sites being built now, operators willing to put a machine on a live site rather than in a laboratory, and heat and dust that find the weak points quickly. Spares, field service and local engineering have to be arranged before the first unit ships rather than after it stops, and the fund is built to set that up as part of the investment.
What that support consists of in practice is set out under Capital + Capability, and how the markets are covered under Global Network.
Next
Building in Robotics?
Founders in the United States, the UAE and MENA can submit their company for review, or read how the fund decides first.