Vecna Robotics: How Daniel Theobald Built Autonomous Forklifts for Walmart and FedEx by Letting Robots Ask for Help

TL;DR: Vecna Robotics is a Waltham, Massachusetts company that makes autonomous forklifts, tuggers and pallet jacks for warehouses and factories, run by its Pivotal orchestration software and a 24/7 remote command center. It was spun out in 2018 from Vecna Technologies, the bootstrapped company Daniel Theobald started in the late 1990s after his MIT master's thesis. His core insight was simple: robots will never be perfect, so build them to know when they are stuck and call a human. As he shared on the show, that led to early pilots with FedEx, a 50-robot order from Walmart, and robots that did 18% more work within two months through software updates alone. Vecna reported $128.5M raised through its January 2022 Series C, and has since announced a $40M Series C close (June 2024), $14.5M from existing investors (November 2024) and a $31M round led by Unless (September 2026). Theobald told the story on The Product Market Fit Show. The episode aired in August 2024, so every figure he gave was as of then.

A note on sourcing. Anything labeled "as he shared on the show" comes from the interview and has not been independently confirmed. Funding and company figures labeled with a source and date were checked against press coverage in November 2026.

What does Vecna Robotics do?

Vecna Robotics automates the movement of pallets and cases inside warehouses, distribution centers and factories. Its robots include an autonomous forklift, an autonomous tugger, and the CPJ co-bot pallet jack. All of them are coordinated by Pivotal, Vecna's command and control software, with a remote command center where humans can help robots that get stuck (The Robot Report, November 2024).

Theobald explained why pallets are such a big target.

"Pretty much everything you see spent part of its supply chain life on a pallet. Like pallets are the way our physical economy moves." — Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics

A tugger, he said on the show, is "basically a forklift, but without the forks." It pulls pallets or other loads on trailers behind it, like a train without tracks.

In 2025 Vecna launched CaseFlow, a case-picking system where robots carry loads while human pickers work alongside them. As of September 2026, the company says CaseFlow demand has more than doubled year over year, and GEODIS reported it doubled picking throughput (Modern Materials Handling, September 2026).

Key stat: as he shared on the show, Vecna had hundreds of robots deployed in mid-2024, across apparel, beverage, hardware and automotive customers, moving "thousands and thousands of pallets every day."

Who founded Vecna Robotics?

Daniel Theobald founded Vecna Robotics. His path started at MIT, where, as he shared on the show, he designed an internet-based robotic operating system for his master's thesis between 1995 and 1998. He wrote it in Java, then a brand-new language.

After a stint at a healthcare software company, he started Vecna Technologies, doing healthcare software for the US military and the Veterans Administration, including hospital check-in kiosks. That work paid for what he called his "robotics habit," along with research grants from the military. Back then, he said, the military was the only real place to fund mobile robotics.

One early project was the BEAR robot, a humanoid built to rescue soldiers from the battlefield. He was candid that it was never going to work for that job. The lesson stuck: the real world is messy, and you cannot test every scenario a robot will face.

Vecna Technologies was bootstrapped for about 20 years. No loans and no venture capital, as he shared on the show. He only decided to bring in outside money around 2018 to 2019, once he felt confident he could deliver the returns he would want as an investor.

According to its Wikipedia entry, Vecna Robotics was spun out in 2018 with about 60 employees from Vecna Technologies, and Dan Patt, a former DARPA deputy office director, is also listed as a founder. Leadership has changed several times since:

• 2020: Theobald took over as CEO (Wikipedia).
• June 2021: Craig Malloy, founder of Lifesize, was named CEO (Business Wire, June 2021). By January 2022, Theobald's title was Chief Innovation Officer (The Robot Report).
• November 2024: Karl Iagnemma, co-founder of nuTonomy and founding CEO of Motional, was named CEO. The announcement described Theobald as founder and chairman (The Robot Report, November 2024).

How much has Vecna Robotics raised?

Total funding figures vary a lot across data sites, from about $120M to $278M. These are the rounds I could match to press coverage.

• August 2018: $13.5M, led by Drive Capital, the company's first outside equity (Wikipedia). Pablo referenced this round on the show.
• January 2020: $50M in new funding (Wikipedia).
• January 2022: $65M Series C, led by Tiger Global, with Lineage Logistics, Proficio Capital Partners and IMPULSE, plus existing investors Blackhorn Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Tectonic Ventures, Drive Capital and Fontinalis Partners. The company said total funding reached $128.5M (The Robot Report, January 2022).
• June 2024: $40M, closing the Series C at about $100M. DC Velocity reported that the full round nearly doubled Vecna's valuation from its previous round. No valuation figure was disclosed.
• November 2024: $14.5M from existing investors, announced with Iagnemma's appointment (The Robot Report).
• September 2026: $31M, led by Unless, with Drive Capital, Tiger Global, Highland Capital Partners and Tectonic Ventures (Modern Materials Handling, September 2026).

Key stat: adding the rounds announced after the company's $128.5M total in January 2022 gives roughly $214M in announced funding as of November 2026. That is my sum of public announcements, not a figure the company has confirmed.

The episode title mentions $150M raised. I could not match that exact figure to a company announcement, so it is not used here. No revenue figure has been publicly confirmed.

For more on financing physical products, see product-market fit for hardware startups.

Why did Vecna design robots that are not perfect?

This is the counterintuitive move at the center of the company. In 2018, Theobald said, most mobile robotics companies were still academic. Their robots were cool but expensive, fragile and only worked some of the time. They were trying to build robots that always worked. He decided that was impossible.

"So once I was able to really internalize that fact and say, okay, well, what we need to do is build a system from the ground up that allows the robots to not be perfect." — Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics

That meant solving three problems in order, as he described them on the show:

1. Know when you need help. Robots have no reasoning beyond what engineers program. Vecna built ways to detect when a robot is not making enough progress on its mission. 2. Ask for help. The robot calls home to the Pivotal command center, even in warehouses with weak connectivity. 3. Let a human fix it fast. A remote operator logs into the robot, reviews its cameras and history, and decides what to do.

"Most of the time, those interactions only take about 30 seconds because a human is an amazing machine, super, super smart and able to figure things out in ways that computers and robots are still a long ways from." — Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics

His example: an autonomous forklift arrives to pick up a pallet and cannot find it. The pallet might be missing, shifted or damaged. The robot tries several recovery moves, then calls for help. If the pallet is not there, the operator cancels the mission. If something physical is wrong, they call a "local assist" on site, and the robot goes off to do other work in the meantime.

Academics told him that if his robots really worked, he would not need humans. His answer: business is about delivering value.

How did Vecna Robotics find its first customers?

Once Vecna accepted that robots did not need to be perfect to be useful, it could start selling right away. Theobald's view was that market studies only go so far.

"Cause you're never going to know if you have product market fit until you actually have product market fit, right?" — Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics

The autonomous forklift already existed from a research grant, which he believed came from the Navy. Vecna took it to big logistics players like FedEx, Walmart and DHL, and also to small local customers, so the product would be tested in many kinds of sites. As he shared on the show, one of the first pilots was with FedEx, using automated tuggers.

Safety was the biggest hurdle. Heavy robots that move near people have to be certified to fail safely, to a standard called performance level d. It took a lot of time, money and engineering. It also helped.

"So safety was one of the big hurdles that we had to overcome, which was both good and bad from a business point of view. It was good from the perspective of once we solve these problems, it created a very large moat around our business." — Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics

Key stat: as he shared on the show, robots cost about $100K to $150K each at the time, and the first year roughly doubled that per robot once you add the control system and deployment. Most sales later moved to a robots-as-a-service model with a monthly fee, which he said lets customers start saving money within the first few months.

He also had to sell warehouse managers a new idea: a forklift degrades over time, but Vecna's robots got better through software updates.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, robots deployed at Walmart were getting 18% more work done within about two months, purely from software updates.

Then came bigger orders.

"I mean, we had a 50 robot order with Walmart pretty early on." — Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics

COVID hit soon after. As he shared on the show, Walmart told the team it hated to do it, but corporate had ordered all innovation projects shut down. Many large customers moved into capital preservation mode, and it took time for demand to recover. Today, he said, the main friction is customers adapting their operations to robots, for example opening up racking because safety rules require more clearance than a human driver would leave.

When did Daniel Theobald feel product-market fit?

For Theobald, it was a moment on site at a Walmart deployment. The team filmed its robots working in a warehouse of one to two million square feet. He called watching that video "absolutely thrilling" after about a decade of work to get there.

For a similar story in a different corner of robotics, see how Carbon Robotics pre-sold $10M of laser weeding machines and how Bright Machines built robotic manufacturing out of a Flex carve-out.

Key lessons from Daniel's playbook

1. Design for the exception, not the perfect case. Vecna stopped chasing robots that never fail and built a system where failure is handled in about 30 seconds by a human. That made the product sellable years earlier. 2. Bootstrap until you can underwrite the returns. Theobald funded robotics with services revenue and grants for about 20 years, and only raised once he believed he could deliver investor-level returns. 3. Turn the hard part into the moat. Safety certification was slow and costly, but once solved it became a barrier for competitors. 4. Sell the improvement curve. Customers were used to equipment that degrades. Vecna showed that robots improve with software, and moved buyers to a service model with fast payback. 5. Trust your gut, after doing the work. His one piece of advice was to stop letting "less inspired" people talk him out of his convictions.

"Yeah, unambiguously trust your gut. Trust your gut as an entrepreneur, especially." — Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics

He tied that to building an accurate model of the world by talking to customers and staying hands-on with the technology.

"Trust your gut, but you're going to trust your gut because you've done the work to figure out how the world works." — Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics

For more on landing large buyers, see getting your first enterprise customer.

Listen to the full interview: He sold AI robots to Walmart & raised $150M. His #1 advice to founders? "Trust your gut."

FAQ: Vecna Robotics

Q: What is Vecna Robotics? A: Vecna Robotics is a Waltham, Massachusetts company that makes autonomous forklifts, tuggers and pallet jacks for warehouses and factories, coordinated by its Pivotal software and a 24/7 remote command center. It was spun out of Vecna Technologies in 2018. Its CaseFlow case-picking system launched in 2025.

Q: Who founded Vecna Robotics? A: Daniel Theobald founded Vecna Robotics, building on Vecna Technologies, the company he started after MIT. Wikipedia also lists Dan Patt as a founder. As of November 2024, Theobald was founder and chairman.

Q: Who is the CEO of Vecna Robotics? A: Karl Iagnemma has been CEO since November 2024. He previously co-founded nuTonomy and was the founding CEO of Motional. He was still CEO at the time of the September 2026 funding announcement.

Q: How much funding has Vecna Robotics raised? A: The company reported $128.5M through its January 2022 Series C. Since then it has announced $40M (June 2024), $14.5M (November 2024) and $31M led by Unless (September 2026), for roughly $214M in announced rounds as of November 2026.

Q: Who are Vecna Robotics' investors and customers? A: Publicly named investors include Drive Capital, Tiger Global, Highland Capital Partners, Tectonic Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Lineage Logistics, Proficio Capital Partners, IMPULSE and Unless. Press coverage names GEODIS, FedEx, Caterpillar and Shape as customers, and Theobald described Walmart and FedEx deployments on the show.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Daniel Theobald, Vecna Robotics — the MIT roboticist who bootstrapped Vecna Technologies for two decades, then built autonomous forklifts that know when to ask a human for help and won early deals with FedEx and Walmart.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: November 2026