Inventory management startup Corvus Robotics earned a spot on Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s 2024 Top Tech Startups list on Dec. 16.
“We’re on a mission to make inventory management smarter, faster, and just plain better—and it’s awesome to see the supply chain world taking notice,” the company said in a LinkedIn post, celebrating its achievement.
Knowing an enterprise’s inventory and locating a particular item in said inventory are two completely different things. And when a customer is getting impatient, speed in locating an item from the back is of the utmost importance.
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San Francisco-based Corvus Robotics claims to address that problem with an inventory management platform that uses autonomous drones to scan the towering rows of pallets that fill most warehouses. The company’s drones can work 24/7, whether warehouse lights are on or off, scanning barcodes alongside human workers to give them an unprecedented view of their products.
“Typically, warehouses will do inventory twice a year — we change that to once a week or faster,” said co-founder and CTO Mohammed Kabir. “There’s a huge operational efficiency you gain from that.”
While working on Corvus, Kabir was also one of the founders of the MIT Driverless program that built North America’s first competition-winning driverless race cars.
Founded in 2017 by Kabir and CEO Jackie Wu, Corvus already seems to be making a mark when it comes to tracking down inventory for distributors, logistics providers, manufacturers, and grocers.
Corvus’ success is highlighted in the drone platform they have built that can navigate in environments like warehouses where GPS and Wi-Fi may not work. Corvus drones use cameras and neural networks to navigate, giving them an edge in real-world environments.
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“Drones actually only solve a part of the inventory problem,” Kabir said. “[They] fly around to track rack pallet inventory, but a lot of stuff gets lost even before it makes it to the racks. Products arrive, they get taken off a truck, and then they are stacked on the floor, and before they are moved to the racks, items have been lost. They’re mislabelled, they’re misplaced, and they’re just gone.”
“Our vision is to solve that,” he added.
In October, Corvus raised $18 million in Series A funding led by S2G Ventures and Spero Ventures. The same month, the company released an updated version of its Corvus One system that brings, for the first time, the ability to fly its drone-powered system in a lights-out distribution center without any added infrastructure like reflectors, stickers, or beacons.
Corvus Robotics is paving the way for the future of automation in logistics, warehousing, and supply chain management. By combining robotics and AI technology, the company is revolutionizing inventory tracking and operational efficiency across industries.