Image credit: Destro.
Destro has emerged from stealth with an $8M seed round led by Base10 Partners and Bonfire Ventures, with additional investment from CoFound Partners.
Where most robotics startups focus on hardware or models that give robots more capable hands, Destro builds an AI layer that lets robots work effectively in logistics settings. That layer also tells the human workers what to do. Founder Manthan Pawar, a robotics veteran with about eight years in the U.S. supply chain and robotics industry, says the company's edge is that it isn't a robotics company. He also says it is on a path to cash-flow positivity by the end of this year.
The product began in picking and packing. Richard Brunelle, director of automation for the American logistics group at Yusen Logistics, saw the same problem in cross-docking, where goods are unloaded from one truck and sorted into mixed loads for others. Destro adapted its tool to that setting.
The first pilot, at a Yusen facility in the Pacific Northwest, used three cart-moving robots from Miva Robotics. They run on Destro's Vision operating system, which is based on open-weight vision-language-action models. A second system, Mothership, directs the human workers, carts, and trucks. According to Brunelle, two other robotics startups Yusen evaluated couldn't fit its workflow. One moved carts but couldn't handle loading or unloading. The other offered fleet management but needed a person to handle all the orchestration.
Destro is expanding the pilot to 26 robots and launching a 17-robot pilot at Yusen's Southern California facility. Pawar plans to repeat the cross-dock workflow across thousands of other warehouses.
