Robots, Resilience & Romanian Roots: Dexory Co-Founder Oana Jinga on Changing Warehouse Logistics
Oana Jinga is the Co-Founder and Chief Commercial & Product Officer of Dexory, where she drives the development of autonomous robots and digital-twin technology that give warehouses real-time, continuous insight into their operations. With extensive experience in tech, she combines AI, robotics, and strategic partnerships expertise to shape Dexory’s product vision and go-to-market execution. Earlier, as Google’s Strategic Partnerships Manager for EMEA, she enabled cross-sector collaborations that modernized retail workflows, experience she now channels into redefining supply-chain efficiency.
How did you and your co-workers come to work together?
It’s a long story. The three of us are Romanians, so we met back home many years ago. Andrei, who’s my co-founder and CEO, and I met in primary school, fifth grade or so, and went through school together, including high school. We later moved to the UK at slightly different times to pursue very different careers. At university he also met Adrian, our third co-founder, also Romanian.
They started working on small side projects in robotics about 15 years ago: bought a 3-D printer and played around at home with different sensors alongside their day-to-day jobs. At one point I got interested in what they were building. They had a small prototype for a home robot and, with my business hat on, I started asking questions: “Who is this for?”, “Who’s going to buy it?”, “What can we name it?”. I joined the team with the view that we should start building with a purpose.
Slowly, we became a team and started working on this idea of a home robot. Over the years we moved that idea across different sectors; we went into retail, got grant funding from the EU and UK government as well as private investment, and those steps led us to where we are today. It’s been quite a long journey, but it all started with us knowing each other from back home in Romania.
Every founder dreams of changing something big. What part of the logistics industry are you most excited about shaking up?
After the pandemic the whole sector started to focus on being a lot more resilient. They realised they couldn’t operate as they did before: there was chaos and random things that didn’t follow any pattern. Previously, most customers just threw more people at the problem, but what the pandemic brought in is the need to be as agile and lean as possible. Our focus now is to enable them to have more control over their warehouse operations by providing visibility across all assets and resources at any time: where the stock is, how much stock there is, how many people are working on it and how they can be more operationally efficient. That real-time visibility drives the resilience we’re aiming for.
Many deep-tech solutions look exciting on paper but struggle with real-world deployment. Did you encounter a challenge at Dexory that you didn’t anticipate, and how did you solve it?
It’s an interesting question because a lot of people who build heavy R&D companies start from the technology and then try to find room for it to make a difference in the real world. What happened to us was the other way around, logistics players and warehouse owners asked if we could help solve a problem they already had, so our technology was scoped to fit a market pull.
Even so, once you go into physical spaces you always find uncertainties and elements you don’t necessarily anticipate. Some warehouses look like hospital floors, with everything neat and in the right place, while others are completely chaos-driven with items left on the floor and packaging everywhere. This randomness is tough for automation, because everything that is random will not fit or will be more difficult to integrate into certain parameters. The messiness of warehouses took us by surprise, so we had to adapt our tech, but because we built it with that purpose in mind it was still much easier than if we’d started with the tech first and tried to find a use for it.
How do you strike a balance between long-term innovation and meeting short-term customer needs?
The more we evolve our solution, the more we realize we bring customers insights, data and analysis they never had before, so it can be difficult for them to understand the potential of it and what they can do with it. It follows the classic Ford quote that if you asked people what they wanted they’d say faster horses, not cars. If we rely only on what customers ask for, it limits what we can do.
As a tech company we need to stay a step ahead and take our customers on the journey with our capabilities, even if some are hesitant at first and even if we risk losing business along the way. It’s easier now that we’ve got global deployments, use cases and potential customers can rely on the experience of their peers. But I’d say we’re in that bucket of people who try to stay ahead, and innovation is our driving force. It always has to stay anchored in customer premises and needs, but you can’t just be limited to that.
How do you translate the technical complexity of your solution for a broader audience?
It’s pretty simple to explain the technology, it’s a little more complicated when it comes to showing what they can do with the data we’re unlocking. We have a 14 metre probe robot that moves around warehouses fully autonomously and acts like a giant scanner. It takes continuous images and 3D analysis of the entire space, digitizes them almost instantly on the device, and customers access a visual platform we call a digital twin, which is a digital replica of the physical warehouse. It’s easier for people who understand logistics to see the potential of this type of data more easily, but in essence they use it to make sure the right stock is in the right place at the right time so they can fulfill all the orders they have across the warehouse.
Is there a lot of education you have to do in the market about the possibilities of using this data?
Definitely. We see it as our responsibility to try and build this because we have access to vast amounts of data, information, processes and understanding of what makes a warehouse run well. We anonymize those insights and package them as learning tools, white papers, thought-leadership pieces or any other content that shows what best-in-class looks like and how to get there. We start with customers wherever they are, and we can only innovate in our industry because we take the customers on a journey with us and build them up as they get more insights. And of course you’re going to have blockers and people who believe they don’t need as much intelligence, so we’ll start on a lower ground to convince them to adopt our technology gradually and see the benefits for themselves.
Do you see openness in the industry when it comes to adopting this extra layer of intelligence?
To be honest yes, and it’s very different from when we started in late 2020. Initially there was panic and fear of adoption and of challenging the status quo. Logistics is one of the oldest industries we’ve got, so ways of working are generationally ingrained. But the pandemic was the type of pivotal moment that changed mindsets. I also think that competition drives openness. Big players are fighting for market share, building new warehouses, expanding a lot, and feeling pressure from e-commerce players with end-to-end supply chains. They realize that the way to stay ahead is through tech, and the conversations we have now are very different from five years ago.
Innovation requires an environment that tolerates failure. How do you encourage experimentation and even failure in your team at Dexory?
When you build something completely new, you give it everything, and it might succeed or fail. But if the version 0.1 becomes a stable platform and gets into customers’ hands, you start having a responsibility to make sure it works in a predictable and repetitive way. Everything afterwards is built the same way: we experiment, test and trial with a small number of warehouses. When it’s ready and productionized we ship it widely, and by then it can no longer fail. Creating those pockets where we can test and fail is crucial, but we protect what’s live because we work with enterprise customers who can’t afford any mistakes. We’re dividing what’s in production and what’s not in production to make sure that we can innovate, but that we also keep stability and not sacrifice robustness.
If you had to choose one metric to define Dexory’s success, what would it be and why?
We use this word a lot, but resilience. We’ve always had multiple challenges thrown at us, and knowing how to pull ourselves together, adapt and move ahead was vital. We raised our Series B less than a year ago, we’re now moving into proper scale-up mode, with customers around the world, the team growing to nearly 200 people, and the challenges we have today are different from those six or twelve months ago. But they’re still challenges and at every step there will always be new ones. If ten years from now we’ve maintained that resilience and not gotten complacent, we’ll consider ourselves a global success.
From a culture perspective, how do you make sure you keep inspiring the team as you grow?
We just finished our updated values and culture proposition, based on the initial framework we put together eight years ago. Presenting it to the team we heard, “We’re already doing this and keeping each other accountable this way.” And we believe that’s the point: culture should reflect what’s already ingrained into the team, and even the people who joined us recently reflect our values very well. As founders we’re still involved every day, we even participate in recruitment, but as you grow your team starts owning and driving the culture when you’re not in the room, so when we got this feedback it was a confirmation that we’re on the right track.
Joining Endeavor Romania marks a new chapter. What are you hoping to learn or accomplish through being part of the network?
It’s two-ways. Selfishly, of course we want to learn, to understand our gaps and see what else we could be doing, but equally we also want to give back. And I say it in the most humble of ways, we’ve been on a journey and made mistakes other founders on similar paths can learn from. We want to give back to the Romanian community of entrepreneurs, where there’s so much talent, but there’s also a perception that it’s hard to get external funding and customers. We hope to inspire and help grow the community, and to show that you can grow globally, not without hard work, but that it’s doable. We have a small team and some customers in Romania, so it’s great to build that community from the inside through Endeavor.
What’s one thing Romanian founders who are scaling globally aren’t ready to hear?
I don’t know if it’s just Romanians or Europeans in general, but it’s something I hear from our investors and mentors ever so often. There’s something about the American mentality of dreaming big that makes it look like we hold ourselves back a little bit. Culturally speaking there are some limitations in the way we think we can achieve success and how big we can go due to the fact that we can be more constrained or humble. But once you wanna scale globally, you go head-to-head with US entrepreneurs who have no boundaries and no limits and who want to make their business as big as possible regardless of anything or anyone else. I’m not saying we should completely change who we are, but challenging ourselves by thinking “Is this big enough? Can I go bigger?” takes us further. We fight with that ourselves every day.
Are we actually ready for success? Because in risk-averse cultures we prepare so much for failure that we might not prepare for global success. How can we do that better?
100%. We have a fantastic board and investors, but many conversations go towards “What if this happens or what if that happens?” to which I always say, “What if it doesn’t? What if it goes really well?” If you only prepare for the worst you can end up blocking or limiting your success; of course it’s important to be cautious, but it doesn’t hurt to aim higher. What really helps with this mentality is having advisors who also look at how big things could be and who balance your views. And then there’s the founding team, where you also have to strike some balance. For us, among the three co-founders, Andrei was always thinking extremely big, Adrian as CTO focused on resilience, and I balanced the two. This internal balance helps us decide when to take risks and go bold, but this being said I’m still seeing it more in the US than in Europe.