For Cavalla, An Improved Supply Chain Starts With a Better Forklift

Victor Boyd has a vision of a world where people anywhere can get anything in just five hours.

His bid to fulfill this ambition goal begins with warehousing — a key component of the supply chain web. When he started talking to companies about their biggest bottleneck, a surprising consensus emerged: forklifts.

“We really tried to find something new, but it all came back to autonomous forklifts,” Boyd told A3. “This was very surprising for us because when we were first looking, it looked like it was solved. We saw so many things in the market when we looked up autonomous forklifts, it was very surprising to continuously hear that none of them work. So it was basically a journey of  finding out why they don't work.”

The answer was that the current offerings just weren’t reliable enough. Boyd launched Cavalla alongside co-founder Mo Nafisi in 2023. The startup builds autonomous forklifts that can carry up to 3,300 lbs at a time and feature an eight-hour battery life -- the equivalent of a fully autonomous shift.

The company doesn’t sell these forklifts, choosing instead to offer them as a service, so that Cavalla can more easily expand into adjacent categories like inventory management and trucking scheduling in the future, Boyd said.

This mission of making it possible for anything to get anywhere in a few hours stemmed from Boyd’s childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, he said, which was filled with hours of watching deocumentary TV shows like Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole and How It’s Made. Watching such shows made him an optimist. Then he grew up.

“This future I was promised is not coming about, and before it was just upsetting, but now I actually have to do something about it because I really want it,” Boyd said. “I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew that that was how my life was going to turn out. I was going to try to accelerate the entire species into the future that I thought I was promised.”

Boyd’s original vision for Cavalla was to autonomize existing forklifts to lower the barrier of entry. But forklifts aren’t standardized which meant this wasn’t as easy of a path as they had hoped. They ended up designing their own forklift and working with a manufacturing partner that had an existing supply chain. Cavalla declined to share who the partner is. 

A year into building Cavalla, Boyd snuck out in the middle of the night to catch a flight to San Francisco. He didn’t tell anyone and moved with hope of being able to tap into the city’s founder ecosystem and energy. A few years later he applied to Peter Thiel’s two-year startup incubator, the Thiel Fellowship, for founders under 22 that drop out of college or skip it entirely.

Now, the company is equipped with the $250,000 in funding from the program which wrapped up in April. Cavalla is in discussions with potential customers across cold storage, pharmaceuticals, defense and more as it looks to start deploying.

“It is all about meaningful change, not just iteration, but full planet-scale innovation,” Boyd said. “The whole driving force behind this company is how can we change the world? How can we bring about the right future? We have to do this because nobody else will do it if we don't, that's it. That's the most important thing here.”