Mytra (company)
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Mytra (Mytra Inc.) is an American warehouse robotics and automation company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It builds a three-dimensional, software-defined storage and material-handling system in which low-profile robots move full pallets and other loads through a dense steel lattice in the X, Y, and Z axes, an approach the company positions as an alternative to conventional pallet racking, fixed automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), and floor-based autonomous mobile robots. The company was founded in 2022 by Chris Walti, who previously led mobile robotics and material-flow automation at Tesla and started the program that became Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot, together with Ahmad Baitalmal, a software and automation leader from Tesla and Rivian. Mytra emerged from stealth in July 2024 with $78 million in funding and disclosed a production deployment at the grocery chain Albertsons. In January 2026 it raised a $120 million Series C, bringing total funding to more than $200 million.
Notably, Mytra does not build a humanoid robot. Walti has publicly argued that the human form is poorly suited to the high-volume, repetitive task of moving material, and Mytra's design instead uses simple, slab-shaped robots constrained to a structured grid. The name "Mytra" is also used as a personal name and by unrelated brands; this article concerns the warehouse robotics company at mytra.ai.
Mytra was founded in May 2022 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its two co-founders both came from electric-vehicle manufacturers. Chris Walti spent roughly seven years at Tesla, moving from engineering into manufacturing and automation during the Model 3 production ramp, eventually leading the company's mobile robotics and material-flow automation work and starting the effort that became the Optimus humanoid program. Ahmad Baitalmal led factory and automation software at Tesla and Rivian and had earlier been a chief product architect at Xerox PARC; at Mytra he serves as chief technology officer. Walti is co-founder and chief executive officer.
The company spent its first two years in stealth, developing the hardware and software and running early pilots before a public launch on July 23, 2024. The venture was incubated by Eclipse Ventures, a firm that focuses on industrial and "full-stack" hard-technology companies.
Walti has tied Mytra's premise directly to his Tesla experience. He has said that "just moving stuff around" is the most valuable and most common problem in industrial operations, and that there are an enormous number of possible ways to route a given load through a dense system, which is the optimization problem Mytra's software is built to solve. He has also voiced skepticism about near-term humanoid robots on factory floors, telling reporters that "it's going to be a while before humanoids are truly moving the needle on a production floor," while remaining bullish on the form factor over a longer horizon. These remarks were widely read as a pointed contrast with his former employer's bet on Optimus.
By the time of its 2026 Series C, Mytra had assembled a leadership team heavy with former Tesla, Rivian, and large-scale logistics operators.
| Name | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Chris Walti | Co-founder, CEO | Former Tesla mobile robotics / material-flow automation lead; started Tesla's humanoid program |
| Ahmad Baitalmal | Co-founder, CTO | Led factory software/automation at Tesla and Rivian; former chief product architect at Xerox PARC |
| Gabi Gantus | CFO | Former Tesla director of finance for manufacturing and supply chain |
| Matt Naslund | Chief Commercial Officer | Automation roles at UPS, Walmart, and Stitch Fix |
| Ingrid Cotoros | Chief Development Officer | Product development leadership at GoPro and Meta |
| Nigel Marcussen | VP of Scaling | Former senior director at Rivian |
| Zach Kirkhorn | Board member | Former Tesla chief financial officer |
Mytra raised across four disclosed rounds. After an initial seed round around its 2022 founding, it raised a $28 million Series A in 2023 and a $50 million Series B led by Greenoaks that it announced alongside its July 2024 launch, for $78 million in total financing through Series B. On January 15, 2026, the company announced a $120 million Series C led by Avenir Growth, which brought cumulative funding to more than $200 million.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead / notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2022 | Undisclosed | Eclipse Ventures (incubated the company) |
| Series A | 2023 | $28 million | Eclipse Ventures, Greenoaks |
| Series B | July 2024 | $50 million | Greenoaks (lead); Eclipse; 515 Ventures (Frederic Kerrest); angels Garry Tan, Lachy Groom |
| Series C | January 2026 | $120 million | Avenir Growth (lead); new: Kivu Ventures, Liquid 2, D. E. Shaw Ventures, Offline Ventures; returning: Eclipse, Greenoaks, Abstract Ventures, Promus Ventures; strategic: Lineage, RyderVentures |
The Series C added strategic investors from the logistics industry, including the cold-storage operator Lineage and RyderVentures, the corporate venture arm of the transportation and supply-chain company Ryder System. Announcing the Series B, Greenoaks partner Neil Shah said that warehouses are "the backbone of the global economy" yet most remain manual or rely on automation that is "too complex and too rigid," and that Mytra "breaks the trade-off between automation and flexibility" by abstracting away hardware complexity.
Mytra has reported rapid operational scaling around the Series C: through 2025 it said it grew its workforce by roughly 78 percent, moved into a facility about seven times larger than its previous space, signed contracts with a Fortune 100 food company and a Fortune 500 industrial-supply distributor, and completed a deployment about 60 times larger than its previous largest installation. As of early 2026 the company described itself as having more than 150 employees and being headquartered in Brisbane, California; at its 2024 launch it had been based in South San Francisco.
Mytra's system is built around three components: the robots, a modular steel structure, and the software that coordinates them.
The storage structure is a modular grid, sometimes described as a lattice or "matrix," assembled from repeating steel cubes, or cells. Because the structure is modular, it can be arranged into a high-density block of almost any footprint and can extend vertically up to about 80 feet tall. Unlike a traditional racking layout or many AS/RS designs, the grid has no fixed aisles, which the company says removes much of the "dead space" that aisles consume in a conventional warehouse and lets storage fill both the floor and the vertical volume more completely. Mytra has cited the elimination of roughly 60 percent of the empty aisle space found in a typical warehouse.
The robots, which the company calls MytraBots, are low-profile machines that travel through the grid in all three dimensions, moving from any cell to an adjacent cell in any direction. They use mechanisms (including rollers and an integral vertical lift) to shuttle loads horizontally and to raise and lower them between levels, functioning somewhat like pallet jacks that can also climb the structure. Each robot can handle loads up to about 3,000 pounds (roughly 1,360 kilograms), which spans everything from small totes and boxes on a tray up to a full-size pallet. Mytra describes this full 3D movement of heavy unit loads from any cell to any adjacent cell as a defining difference from grid systems that move only smaller bins or that constrain robots to the top of the structure.
A layer of AI-driven, edge-intelligent software orchestrates the robots: it plans and optimizes their routes through the grid, avoids collisions and traffic jams, and can dynamically reconfigure how the matrix is used, including the effective size of cells, to suit whatever is being stored at a given time. The company frames the software as abstracting material handling into a small set of primitives along the lines of "move, store, pick, and route," so that the same physical system can be reconfigured for different workloads without rebuilding the hardware. This software-defined flexibility is central to how Mytra distinguishes itself from fixed conveyor and crane-based automation. The approach draws on machine learning and optimization for routing and orchestration across many simultaneously moving robots.
Mytra positions its product against several existing categories of warehouse automation. Compared with traditional pallet racking served by forklifts, it promises far higher storage density and less manual labor. Compared with fixed AS/RS (cranes and shuttles on rails) it argues its grid is more flexible and reconfigurable. Compared with grid-based bin systems such as those popularized by AutoStore, Mytra emphasizes that it handles full, heavy pallet loads in true 3D rather than only smaller totes. And compared with fleets of floor-roaming warehouse robots and AMRs, it argues that a structured grid is more predictable and space-efficient for the specific task of dense storage and pallet movement. Independent and company sources have reported figures from early deployments of roughly a 32 percent reduction in material-handling labor and about a 34 percent improvement in storage density; at launch the company also advertised larger best-case claims, including up to 88 percent labor-hour savings and roughly double the return on investment of what it called best-in-class incumbent technology.
The most prominent named customer is Albertsons Companies, one of the largest grocery operators in the United States. Mytra has said its system runs in production at select Albertsons distribution centers, where it buffers and sequences inventory before it ships to stores. Beyond Albertsons, the company has described a pipeline of large enterprise customers without naming most of them, referring to Fortune 50, Fortune 100, and Fortune 500 accounts, including a Fortune 100 food company and a Fortune 500 industrial-supply distributor signed during 2025.
The launch drew broad coverage in both the technology and the supply-chain press, including TechCrunch, SiliconANGLE, Fortune, PitchBook, and trade outlets such as Modern Materials Handling, DC Velocity, and The Robot Report. The Robot Report named Mytra to its RBR50 list and recognized it as a 2025 startup of the year. Much of the coverage framed the company through Walti's Tesla pedigree and his contrarian, anti-humanoid stance on industrial automation.