Nine People, One Pallet Jack: The Danish Startup Taking the Forklift Industry by Storm

The Mobile Robot Company is a nine-person Danish startup founded in November 2024 by robotics veterans Emil Hauch Jensen and Odin Kudahl Skovsted. Just nineteen months later, the company won the prestigious IFOY Industrial Truck of the Year 2026 award for its J1600 self-driving pallet jack, beating established industry giants.

The J1600 is designed to bridge the gap between manual labor and full automation by deliberately leaving the hardest tasks to humans. The walk-behind electric pallet jack features standard specifications and physical controls for manual use, alongside a touchscreen, 3D lidar, and safety scanners for autonomous operation. While it can navigate independently, build its own 3D maps, and deliver loads without infrastructure like floor tape or Wi-Fi, it cannot pick up pallets by itself. The founders intentionally built in this limitation because fluctuating supplies and unstable loads make full automation impractical for most warehouses. By handling about eighty to ninety-five percent of the transport time, the robot allows human workers to stay in control while multiplying productivity.

The company keeps operations lean, self-funded, and transparent, publishing its flat sixty-five thousand euro price tag online alongside transparent costs for accessories, installation, and trials. Rather than building direct sales teams, the startup relies entirely on a growing global network of distributors and partners. As the company prepares to announce its first customer deployments, it is targeting small and medium enterprises that lack million-euro budgets but need affordable, flexible logistics automation.