Brisbane, Calif.-based Mytra Robotics has closed a massive $120 million Series C funding round to deploy its radical pallet-storing robots. The startup’s automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS), which uses mobile robots that climb storage racks, handles pallets weighing up to 3,000 lb. and aims to transform the century-old, labor-intensive world of material handling.
Material flow is the stubborn backbone of global industry, but it’s breaking under modern pressure. According to U.S. Census data, moving and handling materials eats up nearly 50% of manufacturing labor. Yet, as Mytra points out, the fundamental methods haven’t evolved in a hundred years. The result is a critical labor shortage, with over 400,000 industrial roles currently open—a figure the National Association of Manufacturers warns could balloon to 2 million by 2030. The problem is compounded by profound inefficiency in the warehouses themselves; as reported by industry analysts, a staggering 60% of a typical warehouse’s footprint is “dead space” devoted to aisles, and roughly 80% of facilities have no automation due to high costs and inflexibility.
“I saw firsthand that material flow needs a fundamental platform shift, not incremental improvements,” said Chris Walti, co-founder and CEO of Mytra. “We’re not building better warehouse robots; we’re rebuilding the infrastructure layer that every industrial process depends on. Material flow should work like cloud computing: abstracted, programmable, and continuously optimizing.”
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Mytra’s solution is both clever and counterintuitive. Instead of widening aisles for giant forklifts or installing fixed robotic cranes, they developed mobile Mytrabots that navigate the floor and then climb the racking structure itself. This “passive infrastructure” approach turns every cubic foot of vertical space into usable storage, eliminating the need for the aisles that create so much waste. The system is managed by AI-driven software that treats physical pallet movements—move, store, pick, route—as software-defined primitives, allowing for dynamic optimization. For cross-docking operations, this means pallets can be intelligently staged and queued for trailer loading, smoothing a notoriously chaotic process.
The impact is quantifiable. In early deployments, Mytra has demonstrated a 32% reduction in material handling labor and a 34% improvement in storage density. This performance helped the company, named the 2025 RBR50 Startup of the Year, land contracts with major players, including a Fortune 100 food company and a Fortune 500 industrial supplier. Their growth trajectory has been steep: in 2025 alone, they signed a deployment 60 times larger than any prior installation, moved into a new headquarters 7 times bigger, and grew their team by 78%.
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To fuel its next phase of scaling, Mytra attracted lead investor Avenir Growth for its Series C, with participation from new and existing backers like Eclipse and Greenoaks. The round, which brings Mytra’s total funding to over $200 million, will accelerate production and deployments to meet soaring demand. It also adds formidable talent to the roster: Zach Kirkhorn, the former CFO of Tesla, has joined Mytra’s board, signaling serious ambitions in scaling complex hardware and software systems.
Mytra is betting that the future of logistics isn’t just automated—it’s abstracted. By making physical storage as programmable and efficient as data storage, they aim to turn warehouses from static cost centers into dynamic, optimizing assets. In a market starving for efficiency and labor, this $120 million vote of confidence suggests investors believe they just might have built the next fundamental layer of industrial infrastructure.
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