Corvus raises $20M as co-founder Mohammed Kabir takes over as CEO

Why it matters

Kabir's promotion puts the engineer behind Corvus' autonomy stack in charge of turning a deployed drone fleet into a broader warehouse data platform. The $20 million funds that push as rivals pursue the same inventory record with drones, ground robots and forklift-mounted sensors.

Mohammed Kabir (@mhkabirr) took over as CEO of Corvus Robotics, a Mountain View, California warehouse robotics maker, on Tuesday as the company raised $20 million, according to an August 25th announcement distributed by GlobeNewswire.

The financing was led by Catalyst Investors, with returning investors S2G Investments, Spero Ventures and F7 Ventures. Cibus Capital joined as a new backer. Catalyst investor Sidney Kullar will join Corvus' board.

The CEO change puts Corvus' technical architect in charge at the point when the nine-year-old hardware maker must turn a growing installed base into a durable warehouse data platform. Co-founder Jackie Wu, the outgoing CEO, is stepping back for health reasons and will remain on the board.

A dorm-room drone builder takes the top job

Kabir has been working on drones since he was 14. He met Wu in 2017 after Wu saw his work on navigation for drones operating without GPS, according to a 2024 MIT News profile. Kabir built Corvus' first prototype in his dorm room at MIT's Simmons Hall while studying aeronautics and astronautics.

The founders first tried modifying off-the-shelf aircraft. They eventually designed their own hardware because commercial drones did not offer the low-level control required for fully autonomous flight. Kabir also helped found MIT Driverless, which developed autonomous race cars, before graduating in 2021.

That background shaped Corvus around a narrow and stubborn industrial problem: warehouse records frequently drift from what is sitting on the racks. Kabir has described his motivation as building robots that can operate without human handling and collect physical-world data that otherwise goes unrecorded.

Corvus said in its August 25th announcement that Kabir had served as CTO and led its product and technology work since the company's founding. Wu said Kabir "has architected every part of the technology our customers run today" and had already been involved in running Corvus, making the handoff closer to a consolidation of operating authority than an outside leadership reset.

The round backs a broader inventory system

Corvus' main product, Corvus One, is an indoor drone equipped with 14 cameras. It scans pallet and carton barcodes, records product locations and sends discrepancies to warehouse management systems. MIT News reported that its navigation does not require added stickers, reflectors or beacons, while Corvus says deployments do not require customers to install Wi-Fi.

Corvus installs docks that provide charging and data transfer, and customers can set automated flight schedules, according to the MIT profile. That reduces the localization infrastructure required inside an active facility and lets operators choose when inventory flights run.

Corvus expanded the operating range in February with Corvus One for Cold Chain, which it says can remain inside freezers as cold as -20F. Two months later, it introduced Corvus Trident, a camera and scanning system mounted on forklifts and reach trucks. Trident records pallet movements while warehouse employees perform their normal work.

Corvus says One performs cycle counts across storage locations and provides visibility into inventory at rest. Its Trident announcement says the forklift-mounted system records pallet movements from inbound receipt through putaway, replenishment, picking and outbound shipment. Both feed AIMS, Corvus' software layer for reconciling physical activity with warehouse records.

Kabir described the size of that data stream in Tuesday's announcement. "Our fleet currently analyzes over a million locations every month, giving our customers an unprecedented view into what actually happens inside their facilities," he said.

The new financing brings Corvus' disclosed capital raised to $38 million. An October 8th, 2024 financing led by S2G and Spero had brought the earlier total, including seed funding, to $18 million. Corvus did not disclose a valuation or break out the economics of the new round beyond its size and investor lineup.

Deployment is the proof point, and the test

Corvus says it has deployed more than 300 devices for more than 30 enterprise customers across 26 U.S. states, Canada and Mexico, and analyzes more than 1 million inventory locations each month.

The customer results remain Corvus-reported. Corvus says in its CEO announcement that Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits expanded to more than 40 drones across nine distribution centers and used them to identify more than 35,000 verified inventory discrepancies.

The same Corvus announcement credits its systems with helping GNC count inventory about four times as frequently and redirect 35% of its inventory-control labor. Corvus separately reports that Dermalogica increased inventory imaging frequency by 600%. Those performance figures come from Corvus rather than independent measurement.

Those figures show the operating case Corvus is selling: the machines do not need to replace forklifts or redesign a warehouse to produce useful data. They take over repetitive inventory collection and leave warehouse staff to resolve the exceptions. The harder task is proving that these results recur across facilities with different rack layouts, barcode practices, temperatures and warehouse software.

Hardware deployment also gives Kabir a different CEO assignment from the one he had as CTO. Corvus must manufacture and support devices, install them in working warehouses and keep them operating around employees and material-handling equipment. The million-location monthly figure measures activity, while the next phase requires Corvus to convert that activity into repeatable customer expansion.

Warehouse inventory robots are drawing larger checks

Corvus is raising into an active field. Pittsburgh-based Gather AI raised a $40 million Series B in February for a system combining autonomous drones with cameras attached to forklifts and other moving equipment. Gather reported $74 million in total funding at the time.

Other approaches avoid flying robots altogether. Dexory uses an autonomous ground robot to scan warehouse racks and build a three-dimensional model. Vimaan has promoted forklift-mounted sensing as an answer to drone battery, safety and aisle-disruption concerns.

Corvus' answer is to operate both in the air and on forklifts, then combine the resulting records in one software system. The strategy gives Kabir a larger product surface and a clearer path into daily warehouse operations. It also puts Corvus into direct competition with better-funded rivals pursuing much the same prize: becoming the record of what physically happened inside a facility instead of relying on what workers remembered to scan.

Kabir is taking the CEO role with a product stack he has spent nearly a decade building and a customer footprint large enough to test whether the architecture scales. The $20 million gives Corvus room to turn that engineering history into a broader inventory system. The drones still have to count every pallet first.