Cavalla Shifts Focus to Purpose-Built Autonomous Forklifts as Customer Deployments Accelerate

Announces Aayush Agrawal as Head of Engineering to lead custom hardware effort

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cavalla, the creator of the Cavalier autonomous forklifts is announcing a manufacturing shift as it fulfills more orders for its technology. The company will now produce its own forklifts rather than retrofit customers’ existing models. The company is also set to announce Aayush Agrawal as its Head of Engineering.

Cavalla set out to revolutionize warehousing without a fixed idea of where to start. Following conversations with operators, Cavalla began to solve the problem through creating the first generation of Cavaliers. Autonomous forklifts that kept product moving and delivered on the promises made in the meetings and discussions that developed the concept.

“I started Cavalla because moving physical goods is the bottleneck on nearly everything we want to build, and warehousing is where that bottleneck is both most painful,” said Victor Boyd, Founder of Cavalla. "The companies trying to automate forklifts were not delivering, so we decided to build the system that works on a real warehouse floor."

Cavalla started by retrofitting existing forklifts. That approach surfaced three hard limits. First, every forklift model is meaningfully different from the next, which makes a single, ultra-reliable, low-cost kit harder to build than custom hardware. Second, integrating with a customer's existing forklifts takes a long time, and long integrations are more expensive. Third, many customers rent their forklifts, and rental companies resist modifications, while owners worry about voiding warranties.

These constraints pushed Cavalla to build its own forklift from the ground up. That decision defined the next phase of the company, and the hiring that came with it.

Aayush Agrawal, Cavalla's new Head of Engineering, joins at the start of the custom hardware effort and oversees the controls and autonomy software the Cavalier runs on.

"We were able to move so fast because we were extremely picky in hiring," said Boyd. "Cavalla performed roughly 300 top-of-funnel interviews before we found Aayush Agrawal and jumped at the opportunity to hire him. He came in right as Cavalla committed to building our own hardware, and Aayush went on to architect the controls and autonomy infrastructure that powering Cavalier. Aayush is the main reason Cavalla shipped those first deployments, and he set a high bar we have held every hire to since. "

"Retrofitting showed us exactly where the limits were, and custom hardware let us design the controls and the vehicle as one system," said Agrawal. "Going full stack is what makes the Cavalier reliable and running every single day."

Cold-storage facilities run at temperatures that make manual forklift work slow, costly, and difficult to hire for. Autonomous forklifts run those shifts continuously, without the turnover and safety exposure that come with putting people in freezing aisles for hours at a time. That turns labor from a ceiling on growth into something operators can scale predictably, with higher throughput, more consistent uptime, and a safer floor.

About Cavalla

Cavalla builds autonomous forklifts for warehouse logistics, starting with the purpose-built Cavalier. The company uses warehousing as the entry point into a larger vision for automated freight and transport. Interested operators can reach Victor Boyd directly at [e-mail]. Cavalla was founded by 2026 Thiel Fellow Victor Boyd. Learn more at cavalla.ai.