Danish Startup Upends the Forklift Industry with a Self-Driving Pallet Jack That Keeps Humans in Charge
A self-funded, nine-person company just beat the forklift industry’s giants to Industrial Truck of the Year.
Stopping at 80% to 95% automation avoids the costly engineering that makes full autonomy uneconomic for most warehouses.
It was the busiest week in The Mobile Robot Company’s short life. Co-founder and CTO Odin Kudahl Skovsted and the team were in Italy demonstrating the company’s robot to prospective customers. So when the 2026 IFOY Industrial Truck of the Year was announced in Stuttgart in June, CEO Emil Hauch Jensen was sitting alone in the middle of the audience, surrounded by the established manufacturers his company was up against. Then they read out the winner.
“I was kind of shocked,” Mr. Jensen said. “I had honestly no expectation of winning.”
The two met in 2018 at Mobile Industrial Robots, where Mr. Jensen ran sales in China and Mr. Skovsted led technical support and customer success. Between them they had deployed more than 10,000 robots and reached the same conclusion: the hard part was rarely the robot but the integration around it. At the ROSCon conference in Odense in October 2024, Mr. Skovsted put the question directly: “Emil, why don’t we do this ourselves?”
The company was founded a month later. The result, the J1600, launched on 20 October 2025: a 1,600-kilogram pallet jack that drives like a conventional truck in manual mode and delivers autonomously in dual mode. A human always picks up the pallet.
“It’s not a philosophy,” Mr. Jensen said in a statement. “It’s a limitation that is intentionally designed into the product.” Stopping at 80% to 95% automation, he argues, avoids the costly engineering that makes full autonomy uneconomic for most warehouses.
The company publishes its list price of €65,000, about half that of comparable robots, sells only through partners and now has distributors in eight countries.
Incumbents can copy the format, Mr. Jensen concedes. “Everybody can make a dual mode,” he said. “I don’t think everybody can make it as easy to use and as well designed as us.”
Mr. Jensen treats the trophy from Stuttgart as a proof point, not a finish line. “Ten years from now, I hope that all the pallet jacks will be either automatic or dual mode,” he said.
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Mobile Robot- Contact Information
- Emil Hauch Jensen
- CEO
- The Mobile Robot Company ApS
- (45) +45-88109012
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