Transforming warehouses with robotics and AI

From home-security robot to tech start-up

One day in 2015, Oana Jinga and her two housemates were discussing ways they could improve their home security. Jinga worked in business development, Andrei Danescu was in Formula 1 engineering, and Adrian Negoita was a software developer for IBM. They’d recently acquired a 3-D printer and the trio sketched out plans to build a DIY robot with a camera attached that could keep an eye on the house while they were away. They cobbled together a prototype and Jinga found herself wondering about the commercial potential. “I just started to ask questions, like, ‘What should we call this thing? Who’s going to buy this?’ Over a decade later it had evolved into a full-on business that operates globally.”

Today, Jinga is the co-founder and chief commercial and product officer of Dexory. The London-based full-stack tech company has built a warehouse intelligence platform that combines advanced robotics with AI. Its autonomous robots – built in Britain – use advanced sensors to scan stock on racks up to 18 metres high and can track more than 10,000 locations per hour. This data is used to build a digital twin of the warehouse, providing customers with an enviable level of real-time insight into their inventory. Dexory now has a 300-person team and ships its products all over the world. In October 2025, it secured USD 165 million in financing, including a USD 100 million Series C round, to accelerate its international expansion.

Back in 2015, this was still a long way off. The story of Dexory is really one of a long journey to find product-market fit. The trio initially hoped to bring an autonomous home-security robot to market, joining a hardware accelerator, securing grants and EU funding, and building prototypes under the moniker BotsAndUs. “But once we got the first product ready, we realised that if we sell this into the homes it will be quite complicated, because you were talking about a £20,000 to £30,000 product,” says Jinga. “Which for most households is just not feasible.”

The team made their first pivot into retail, demonstrating at trade shows how the robots could take inventory and track customer journeys, and soon picking up their first customers. It was then, Jinga says, that they realised the potential of autonomous robots to capture and digitise real-world data.

Finding product-market fit in logistics

But the biggest shift for the company came when the pandemic hit. They had just received pre-seed funding and now the world had been upended. “We were like, ‘OK, what do we do now, because the whole world is closing’,” says Jinga. “But luckily we were one of the few that were in the right space at the right time.” Customers that had been using their robots in retail suddenly closed their stores and asked if they could jump in to support them with warehousing, instead. “It was the fundamental shift that allowed our company to really take off. We moved into logistics and haven’t looked back.”

Developing robots for the world’s biggest logistics companies is a complicated feat. “But it has to seem uncomplicated,” says Jinga. Providing immediate value to customers is important, which means their systems need to work effectively “out of the box”. This means the robots need to click into any warehouse environment – vast spaces that can span more than 90,000 square metres and are incredibly difficult to navigate: just shelves and shelves and shelves. “It had to fit with whatever they had in there, from the wi-fi and the power, to the floor, the racks, the pallets and type of goods. We had to find a way that the technology moulds itself to the actual processes rather than asking for massive changes, because they wouldn't be able to do those anyway.”

Turning warehouse data into intelligence

Since 2020, Jinga says, the robots have only changed a little. What’s really evolved for the company is what they can do with the data. “We very quickly realised that with all this information we’re capturing, and the fact that we’re capturing it so frequently, you can start observing patterns.” It’s here that Dexory really operates at the cutting edge of modern warehousing. “Say there’s a big TikTok campaign for a particular product,” she says. “What does that mean for our supply chain and for our warehouses?” With advances in AI, Dexory is now building what Jinga says is one of the largest databases of warehouse data in the world.

One thing that has enabled the company to navigate so many changes is the strong personal relationship between its three founders, each with a clearly defined skill set. There is a lot of trust, says Jinga, that comes from having known each other for so long. “For all three of us, this company is our life and it is our goal to make it successful. But that personal relationship allows for us to be quite transparent and also quite blunt. If we’re not comfortable with a decision that someone makes, we challenge each other and we discuss it.”

As Dexory has grown, Jinga has become more conscious that, as a female founder, she is still something of an outlier. She sits at the intersection of a few interesting sectors, but says she was surprised to discover that the logistics world was much more diverse than venture capital or robotics. “Over the past couple of years, I’ve been more and more aware of the impact that I have as a female entrepreneur and others in the sector. I didn’t really have that many examples of success to look at as I was building the business. So I started to be a lot more vocal about my journey.”