Corvus Robotics Names Co-Founder as CEO and Closes a $20 Million Round for Its Warehouse Inventory Drones

A Mountain View startup that sends small drones down warehouse aisles to count boxes has a new chief executive and fresh money to back a product push. Corvus Robotics promoted co-founder Mohammed Kabir to CEO on August 25, replacing Jackie Wu, who co-founded the company with Kabir in 2017 and is stepping back for health reasons. On the same day the company closed a $20 million round led by New York growth equity firm Catalyst Investors, taking its total funding to $38 million.

Kabir has run technology and product at Corvus since the start and architected the software and hardware its customers run today. He built the first Corvus prototype in his MIT dorm room. Wu stays on the board of directors.

"This business began with the belief that the physical world generates enormous amounts of data and almost none of it gets captured or acted on," Kabir said in a statement. "Our fleet currently analyzes over a million locations every month, giving our customers an unprecedented view into what actually happens inside their facilities. Stepping into this role is a privilege, and I am glad Jackie is staying on our board."

Wu framed the handover as amicable and pointed to the pair's long partnership. "Kabir and I have been building this together since 2017, starting with the first Corvus prototype in his MIT dorm room," Wu said. "He has architected every part of the technology our customers run today, and has been deeply involved in the running of the business. There is no one better prepared to lead what comes next."

The Product Line Grows: Cold Chain Drone and a Forklift Copilot

Corvus makes physical-AI robotic systems for warehousing and logistics rather than a single gadget. Its flagship is an autonomous indoor drone that flies through racking aisles and reads barcodes to confirm what is actually on the shelves. The pitch is simple: most warehouses know what a system says they hold, but the physical stock often drifts from that record as goods move, get misplaced, or get pulled from the wrong slot. Corvus drones close that gap between the database and the floor.

The company widened the lineup this year. Corvus One for Cold Chain launched in February 2026, a drone built to run in freezers and refrigerated rooms from ambient temperature down to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit without any localization infrastructure on site. Cold storage is a punishing environment for electronics given the constant frost, condensation, and low temperatures, and most inventory automation stops at the freezer door. Corvus One is an attempt to get continuous, accurate counts inside rooms where manual checks are slow, unpleasant, and expensive to staff.

In April the company added Corvus Trident, an AI copilot that mounts on a forklift and captures pallet movement as drivers work. Instead of a separate scanning pass, Trident watches what each lift moves and logs it automatically, feeding the same ground-truth picture that the flying drones build. Together the two products let a warehouse keep its records honest without dedicating people to a counting routine that used to happen once a quarter or once a year.

Real Deployments and the Numbers Behind Them

Corvus says it has deployed more than 300 warehouse inventory drones across 26 US states, Canada, and Mexico. The customer roster gives a sense of the scale the company is chasing. Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits, the big drinks distributor, runs more than 40 Corvus drones across nine distribution centers and credits them with flagging over 35,000 verified inventory discrepancies. Dermalogica raised its inventory imaging frequency by 600% at its global headquarters. GNC moved to monthly counting, roughly four times its previous cadence.

The company also says customers redirected about 35% of the labor that used to go into inventory work toward higher-value tasks. That last figure matters because it shapes how Corvus sells the story. The case for an inventory drone is rarely about firing people. It is about taking a dull, error-prone chore off the floor and letting the same crew do more useful work, which is a far easier pitch for a warehouse operator to accept than a pure headcount play.

The business case rests on one recurring problem in logistics: a stocking error or a miscount compounds silently until a shipment is short, a pick is wrong, or a bin is emptier than the system believes. A drone that flies the aisles regularly is cheaper than sending staff up and down racks on scissor lifts, and it catches drift before it turns into a customer-facing mistake. Corvus frames its drones as a way to keep the physical truth aligned with the digital record, at a frequency that manual counts cannot match.

What the Fresh Capital Buys

The $20 million round was led by Catalyst Investors, with participation from existing backers S2G Investments, Spero Ventures, and F7 Ventures, plus new investor Cibus Capital. Catalyst's Sidney Kullar joins the Corvus board. The company has now raised $38 million in total.

Corvus framed the round as the broadest product expansion in its history, and the new money is expected to fund growth across the cold chain and forklift copilot lines while the company presses deeper into physical AI. The timing also lines up with a wider appetite for warehouse automation. Retailers and distributors emerged from the pandemic years with a lasting interest in making their fulfillment networks more resilient and more measurable, and a generation of robotics startups has built on that demand.

The leadership change comes with the company still young: Corvus was founded in 2017, when Kabir and Wu began work on that first prototype. Eight years later it counts some of the largest names in US distribution among its customers and is now betting that a founder who has shaped the technology from the beginning can scale the business side of the house as well.

Kabir inherits a pipeline that is already moving. The cold chain drone attacks a gap most competitors ignore, and the forklift-mounted copilot speaks directly to a warehouse operator's daily reality rather than asking them to rework a process around a new machine. Whether that translates into the kind of growth the new valuation implies will depend on how fast Corvus can expand beyond its current run of customer sites.

A Quiet Shift in the Warehouse Robotics Story

The Corvus announcement slots into a broader pattern in warehouse robotics. Early automation focused on the big, visible machines: pallet-moving shuttles, picking arms, and autonomous mobile robots that trundle goods across the floor. The quieter layer is the eyes and ears of the operation, the systems that keep the record honest. Inventory drones sit in that layer because they observe rather than move, and they matter as much to a smooth operation as the robots that physically shift stock.

That distinction is worth keeping in mind when reading about this field. A warehouse that runs on bad inventory data will mispick orders no matter how fast its mobile robots travel. Corvus is selling accuracy at the source, counting what is actually there so the rest of the automated pipeline has correct inputs. It is a less glamorous claim than a robotic arm stacking boxes, but it is the kind of problem that quietly determines whether a fulfillment network keeps its promises to customers.

The question now is momentum. Corvus has a fresh chief executive, a clean balance sheet after the round, and a product line that targets a real gap in the market. Whether Kabir can convert that into the company's next stage of growth is the story to watch in the months ahead. For the logistics industry, the steady creep of observational robots onto the warehouse floor is likely to continue either way, because the underlying problem they solve simply will not go away.

For more on the funding round and the leadership change, the original DroneLife report has the detail, and Corvus posts product updates on its company website. Readers tracking the wider automation push can browse all of our Robotics & Drones coverage for context on how warehouse and logistics robotics are evolving.

The Bigger Picture for Indoor Drones

Corvus is one of a handful of companies betting that indoor, GPS-denied environments are the next drone frontier. Outside, a drone navigates with satellites and open sky. Inside a warehouse there is no GPS signal, racks block line of sight, and the machine has to build a picture of tight aisles, moving forklifts, and shifting pallets using cameras and onboard sensors alone. That is a hard engineering problem, which is why most early commercial drones stayed outdoors.

The payoff for solving it is access to the largest untapped list of drone use cases in commerce. Warehouses today are counted by hand, on ladders and lifts, on schedules measured in months. An indoor drone changes that cadence to whatever the operator wants and returns counts continuously rather than in periodic sweeps. Every hour the drone flies and every discrepancy it catches is evidence for the wider argument that machines are better placed than people to keep an eye on dense, repetitive, high-shelved storage.

That argument is what brought Southern Glazer's and the others to the table, and it is what Catalyst and the returning investors are underwriting. The next few quarters will show whether Corvus can turn a growing customer roster and a new set of products into the scale that makes indoor inventory drones a standard fixture rather than a novelty. For a company that began with a prototype in a dorm room, that would be its own kind of milestone.