Manifold

Manifold is a Los Angeles-based robotics company that supplies autonomous case-handling robots to warehouse operators as an on-demand labor service. Its robots perform case picking, mixed-SKU picking and palletizing, and trailer loading and unloading, handling boxes of up to 65 lbs. The company positions the offering as robotic labor capacity rather than capital equipment: robots are deployed into an existing facility without a large retrofit or extended integration project, and capacity is priced by the pick with no upfront cost.

The system pairs autonomous operation with human oversight. On arrival, the robot maps operating zones — racks, floor-loaded inventory, pallets, containers and existing task constraints — and maintains a live layout of the facility as it moves, using it to locate inventory and route picks. Remote operators resolve edge cases while the autonomy policy is improved with real operating data. The Manifold Orchestration System routes work through a customer's existing ERP, WMS and WES workflows and handles monitoring, multi-robot coordination and teleoperated exception handling.

Manifold was founded in 2026 by Nicolas Yeh (Founder/CEO) and Joshua Ibrahim (Founder/CTO) and is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, where it is categorized under hardware, robotics, logistics, supply chain and warehouse management technology.

Founding story

Co-founder and CEO Nicolas Yeh grew up working in his family's third-generation distribution business, a consumer products supplier to US retailers, where he observed how dependent warehouses remained on manual labor and how existing robots were too expensive, inflexible and difficult to deploy to substitute for that labor. He started Manifold with Joshua Ibrahim, a fellow University of Pennsylvania alumnus and Caltech PhD whose research focused on safety-critical control for robotics. Yeh previously worked at Balyasny Asset Management covering analog semiconductors and at Starwood Capital Group in hotel acquisitions; Ibrahim holds a PhD in applied mathematics from Caltech plus MS and BS degrees in electrical and systems engineering from Penn, and interned in software engineering at Facebook.

Business model

Manifold sells robotic labor as a service rather than robot hardware. Customers pay per pick, with no upfront cost and minimal infrastructure change, so robotic labor spend is tied directly to throughput. The company states the per-pick cost is below that of human labor. Delivery combines fleet operation, remote human supervision of exceptions, and orchestration software that plugs into the customer's warehouse systems.

Usage-based pricing charged by the pick, with no upfront costs or capital purchase required from the warehouse operator.

Traction

As of its Y Combinator company launch, Manifold reported deploying robots to perform more than 5 million picks across multiple warehouses, with a team size of 2.

Latest developments

Manifold was listed as an active company in Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, with Jon Xu as primary partner, and published a launch post describing deployments of more than 5 million picks across multiple warehouses.