Loadstar: Warehouse robotics, leased by the hour

Loadstar builds autonomous mobile robots for warehouses and rents them by the hour rather than selling them outright. Customers pay only for the hours the fleet works, which lets a regional distributor add capacity for the peak season without a seven-figure capital outlay. Robots are typically on the floor within six weeks of signing.

Dana and Marcus came out of a robotics lab in Pittsburgh with working hardware and an unusual commercial model. Grant led the Series A in 2014, when the company had three paying customers and 40 robots in the field, and we backed every round that followed.

Loadstar listed on Nasdaq in 2021 with more than 9,000 robots deployed across 300 sites in North America and Europe. It remains one of the strongest results in Fund I, and both founders still run the company.