AI, in true ‘Terminator’ fashion, is taking over jobs and rendering humans obsolete, or at least that’s the sensationalised sentiment. But for Oana Jinga and her particular field of robotics and AI, this viewpoint doesn’t apply.
She’s the co-founder of Dexory, an AI-powered warehouse intelligence business that uses autonomous robots (that they build, by the way), to capture real-time data from across the warehouse, helping customers make faster, better-informed operational decisions. The result is that clients, including those operating in mammoth-scale warehouses, gain access to real-time data that helps them run their operations more efficiently. Arguably, it’s a good example of AI enhancing how people work, rather than replacing them.
Like many entrepreneurs, Romania-born Jinga had a determination to do her own thing. “I come from a family of doctors,” she reveals. “Growing up, I didn’t have examples of entrepreneurship or people starting businesses.”
Culture, she adds, also had a part to play. “It’s this typical Eastern European focus, you have to have a real job. So, it was quite odd when I said I didn’t want to go to medical school.”
After relocating to the UK for university, she entered the big firm tech world and worked for industry giants including Telefonica and Google. Then came a reunion with two friends from her school days in Romania, Andrei Danescu and Adrian Negoita, who had also moved to the UK for university. The trio began to experiment with a 3D printer, entered robot competitions, and the rest, as they say, is history.
But more on that later, first Jinga wants to explain how Dexory is shaking up the warehouse inventory game.
Inventory innovation, growth and pivots
To give us context, she talks about one customer operating a warehouse of a staggering million square feet. Using Dexory’s warehouse intelligence platform, the business reduced the time needed to complete a full inventory cycle from a year to just 24 hours. “There’s no way a human can capture the data that we have and process it so quickly. Now, they get exactly what’s in each location, what’s moved, how it has changed and so on.” Instead of shutting down operations and bringing in hundreds of people to manually count stock, the customer can maintain a continuously updated view of inventory while reducing disruption and the potential for human error, a significant innovation.
“Most of our customers tell us they struggle to recruit enough people to work in warehouses. If you think about it, they are pretty much in the middle of nowhere; a lot of them are in rural America. So it’s hard for them to find enough people to move those goods.”
Following its rebrand in 2023, Dexory has continued on a rapid growth trajectory, attesting to the transformative impact of its warehouse intelligence platform, DexoryView. Jinga reveals a three times year-on-year revenue growth rate, a workforce hitting the three-hundred mark, and a new Nashville US HQ in addition to their Wallingford HQ in the UK. “The first year was a lot of market education,” she says of the early days of the company. “It’s only after that, 2024 and 2025, that it started taking off. Now, we work with more than a hundred of the biggest logistics players in the world and the trust they have in us is not something that we take lightly.”
The outlook at Dexory is certainly global, with a presence in over sixteen countries. “We officially have the first people on the ground in Australia as well,” she adds. “So the team is growing in that direction.”
Another common argument for AI, aside from improving efficiency, is that it automates repetitive tasks, allowing people to focus on work that adds greater value. Jinga says this is the case in the warehouse world, where many operators face ongoing labour shortages. “Most of our customers tell us they struggle to recruit enough people to work in warehouses. If you think about it, they are pretty much in the middle of nowhere; a lot of them are in rural America. So it’s hard for them to find enough people to move those goods.”
Although she admits there was understandable concern when AI first began appearing in the warehouse sector a few years ago, she claims attitudes have shifted as people have seen how this technology is about supporting warehouse teams rather than replacing them. She gives an example: “To be able to check a makeup pallet on level five in a warehouse, you have to go on a scissor lift that’s pretty wonky and shaky and dangerous. So people prefer not to have to do that and let a machine capture that information.”
“I’m always as close as I can be to the business and I don’t see that changing anytime soon…”
Dexory may be firmly in the warehouse space, but the business didn’t start there. Initially, Jinga and her co-founders envisioned Dexory as a retail-based AI robotics offering. Back then, the company was called BotsAndUs. Following the pandemic outbreak and the retail outlets shutting up shop, the co-founders decided to pivot into a more lucrative space. “We were fortunate because we got our funding and the money landed in the bank in the first week of the first lockdown,” Jinga shares. “We were a very small team back then and had time to really think, okay, where do we want to take the business next? With everyone moving and buying things online, logistics and supply chain became a hot industry. We were approached by quite a few people in warehouses to ask if we could support them.”
Some founders start a business then back away when it scales to success, others want input in the day-to-day, including people management. Jinga and her co-founders belong very much to the latter group.
“All three of us really believe in founder mode. We’re very involved in day to day operations,” she confirms. “I’m always as close as I can be to the business and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. We’ll talk in five to ten years when we have a lot of grey hairs and have gone through everything. But this is very much our life’s work and dedication for the moment.”
Founder life, company culture, and UK tech talent
Dexory, Jinga explains, has a strong company culture with a high-performance mindset at front and centre. She calls this crucial in an “aggressively scaling scale-up” that is a full-stack operation such as theirs. Co-founder Danescu, who had worked in Formula 1, had a hand in this culture mentality, and has, she adds, applied the F1 engineering approach of a quick assembly and speedy problem resolution time to the building and delivering of their robots.
“The one thing I would allow for is more flexibility when applying for visas to come over to the UK. I wouldn’t mind paying a fee for fast tracking things…”
Arguably, high-performance has become something of a dirty word in work culture, with some seeing it as the antithesis to wellbeing. Jinga reveals her take: “I think it’s a very hot topic at the moment around, say, does high performance mean you have to be on twenty-four-seven? On the other hand, we are aggressively scaling. So from that perspective, there’s a lot of work that we’re demanding from everyone in the business. So, when we talk to candidates we make sure they know what they’re coming into.” Jinga’s honesty is a refreshing departure from the many job descriptions online which clothe a demanding job in vague terms like ‘hit the ground running.’
Jinga, although modest about it, can be called an authority in her space. This summer, she, along with a small group of tech leaders, were invited to a No.10 roundtable discussion on UK tech talent.
She shares how the conversation centred around the problems attracting and retaining the brightest minds for tech roles amid post-Brexit obstacles like immigration requirements and added taxation for hiring overseas workers. The problems, so far, are clear, but what are the solutions? Jinga has her government magic wand ready. “The one thing I would allow for is more flexibility when applying for visas to come over to the UK. I wouldn’t mind paying a fee for fast tracking things, especially if I’m trying to bring in somebody quickly because we needed talent yesterday.”
That’s the story of Oana Jinga and Dexory so far. Considering how fast they’ve moved in six years, there’s sure to be an exciting update very soon.
