Bilbao, September 2025. — Basque daily newspaper El Correo has published a feature article on TrebezIA, the autonomous robotics startup spun off from Tecnalia, in the context of B-Venture 2025 — the leading startup-investor meeting point in the Basque entrepreneurial ecosystem. The article, written by Iratxe Bernal and published on September 27, features the perspective of Jon Oñativia, CEO and co-founder of TrebezIA, on the challenges of automation in unstructured logistics environments and the company's technological approach to solving them.
The problem TrebezIA is built to solve
The article focuses on a real market gap: while industrial robots have been highly efficient in repetitive, controlled environments such as automotive assembly lines for decades, their usefulness fades in logistics warehouses where conditions change constantly. Preparing an order with boxes of different sizes, weights, and shapes, in a space shared with people, is a task that traditional automation simply cannot handle.
TrebezIA addresses this challenge with software that combines autonomous navigation, computer vision, and artificial intelligence to enable a robot to move independently through a warehouse, locate the correct product even if it has been repositioned, identify it via barcode, and transport it while dynamically avoiding obstacles — whether human workers or other machines.
"A robot works very well when you program it to perform the same operation systematically. But if you ask it to load boxes of different sizes while people are moving around it... that's where traditional automation falls short."
— Jon Oñativia, CEO and co-founder of TrebezIA (El Correo, 27 Sep. 2025)
Mature technology, product on the way
The article outlines TrebezIA's current stage: the company is in prototype validation, targeting the start of commercialization in 2025 with a first version of the robot adaptable to different types of warehouses with minor configuration changes. Looking further ahead, TrebezIA aims to build a catalogue of specialized robots addressing specific logistics needs.
The planned business model combines outright system sales with recurring revenue from software and hardware maintenance and updates, while also exploring leasing models tailored to different sectors.
B-Venture: a showcase for the investor ecosystem
TrebezIA was selected among the 25 featured startups at B-Venture 2025, held on October 20–21 at the Palacio Euskalduna in Bilbao. The event, promoted by El Correo and supported by the Basque Government, SPRI, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, and Bilbao City Hall, is the leading forum connecting technology entrepreneurs and investors in the Basque Country.
The El Correo feature, published ahead of the event, reflects the growing media interest TrebezIA is generating in the Basque innovation ecosystem — barely a year after its founding.
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