Our investment in Destro
Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Destro’s $8M Seed round alongside our friends at Bonfire Ventures, Unshackled, and Base10.
Late on a Friday afternoon, we met Manthan Pawar, Founder of Destro. After a decade of building and deploying industrial robots at companies like Dexterity, HAI, and Levata, he told us he wanted to build the largest robotics software company.
By Sunday, we committed to invest— one of the fastest decisions in CoFound’s history.
Destro is the mission control layer for the warehouse, bringing together robots, workers, and inventory systems. By ingesting real-time state data, running accelerated digital twin simulations, and learning through hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning, Destro ensures warehouses run smoothly, regardless of the type of hardware on the floor.
We developed conviction quickly because Destro articulated a clear, unique vision for the future, supported by one of the most comprehensive data rooms that we’ve seen. Among the many proof points in the data room was a recording of Manthan leading a customer sales call, which highlighted both his industry expertise and mastery of enterprise sales.
A Unique Insight From The Warehouse Floor
Manthan spent a decade selling and deploying robots. He closed seven-figure deals and deployed 200+ robots. You would expect that track record to produce a robot maximalist. Instead, he watched implementation after implementation stall, and walked away with a contrarian take: the bottleneck isn’t a better robot.
95% of warehouses don’t use robots at scale. There are 200+ humanoid companies, 600+ autonomous forklift manufacturers, and 1,000+ AMR companies already competing for floor space. Hardware is not the constraint.
Manthan’s orientation as a problem-obsessed founder is why he saw the orchestration gap his peers never saw. His peers started companies to build better robots. Manthan asked why the robots that already exist weren’t working.
Undeniable Enterprise Product-Market Fit
Manthan recruited an exceptionally talented roboticist, Soorya Narayanan (who declined a lucrative BigTech offer) to join as CTO. In 6 months, Manthan and Soorya secured an enterprise pilot with a top-10 global third-party logistics provider and beat a $500M-funded unicorn competitor in a head-to-head evaluation.
Today, Destro is already deployed and live in multiple production environments, with demand rising rapidly as word of their outstanding reputation spreads.
Our Mission Control Thesis
Across industries, the robotics boom has fatigued buyers and deepened fragmentation. Every new robot manufacturer that enters the market makes companies like Destro more valuable. The software-first wedge compounds as the solution catalog grows. We believe Destro will become the canonical Mission Control System for warehouses.
Every stochastic physical environment needs its own mission control system. We believe Destro will define this new category and help enterprises unlock all of their robotic investments. If you are building with this thesis, please reach out.
Join Us - Destro is Hiring!
Destro is hiring. If you’re excited to make a real impact as a founding engineer, roboticist, or FDE, please check out their open roles.
If you run a warehouse or large-scale physical operation wrestling with multi-vendor robot complexity, please contact Destro. The mission control layer you need already exists.