Destro AI emerged from stealth on Tuesday with $8 million in seed funding, offering a novel approach to robotics deployment in logistics. Rather than building robots or developing AI models for robot control, the company has created an intelligence layer that coordinates both robot movements and human worker tasks, addressing a key gap in the industry.

Founded by Manthan Pawar, a robotics engineer with eight years in supply chain automation, Destro is piloting its solution at Yusen Logistics facilities, using Miva Robotics carts managed through its proprietary Vision and Mothership operating systems based on vision-language-action AI models. The startup's focus on cross-docking operations—where goods are unloaded from one truck and sorted into mixed loads for onward delivery—represents a problem that established robotics competitors reportedly could not solve, with Pawar claiming the company is on track to achieve cash flow positivity by year's end.