OUT OF THE BOX, INTO THE SKIES: Mary Ma ’15 and the Future of Smart Drones

When Mary Ma ’15 graduated from Millbrook, she had no idea she’d end up helping revolutionize warehouse logistics with autonomous drones.

In fact, at Barnard College, she majored in art history “At the time, I don’t think there was any way I could have foreseen myself going into robotics,” she laughs. But the path from the art world to artificial intelligence, as unexpected as it was, felt natural in retrospect: curiosity, adaptability, and a deep desire to build something useful fueled her transition.

After college, Mary stayed in New York, exploring career paths and spending time with her partner, Jackie Wu, who in 2020 was launching a startup, Corvus Robotics. “I decided to help him out with his startup, which was still very lean,” she recalls. “We were still working on R&D. It was me and three or four other people, including him.” During the early days of the company, which also coincided with the COVID pandemic, Mary taught herself web development and dove into the world of warehouse robotics and automation through hands-on learning and research and development with those who understood the technology, including one of the founding partners who studied aerospace engineering at MIT.

Fast forward a few years, and Corvus is now a growing startup—still under 50 employees— developing fully autonomous drones that perform cycle counting in warehouses. This once manual, dangerous job (often requiring employees to ride scissor lifts 40 feet in the air) is now done by AI-powered drones, designed from the ground up by the Corvus team.

“These drones don’t rely on Wi-Fi or GPS, which is a game-changer in the concrete-and-metal environments of warehouses,” Mary explains. “There’s a basic map with measurements onboard the drone…and it builds on top of that using sensors all around it to create a digital twin of the physical space.”

The results speak for themselves. Warehouse clients—some of the largest retail brands in the U.S.—have seen inventory accuracy rise from 80–85% to more than 99%. “That really speeds things up,” Mary says, “because if somebody is going to that location expecting something, they will find it.”

At Corvus, Mary’s title is production lead, but she has worn many hats: recruiter, head of manufacturing, booth staffer at trade shows, and product ambassador. “We’re still a small team, so if something comes up or somebody needs a hand, I jump in,” she says. “I would call myself kind of a jack—or I guess ‘Jill’—of all trades.”

Though the tech industry remains male dominated, Mary finds the robotics space refreshingly meritocratic. “Everybody is a nerd,” she says with a smile. “Nobody really cares about what you’ve done or where you went to school. They just love geeking out about stuff.”

Today, based in the Bay Area, Mary remains driven by the potential of mission-driven innovation. “We’re focused on growth and providing real value,” she says. “We want to make a positive contribution to one of the backbones of the world—the supply chain.”

What’s next? Mary won’t say exactly, but teases: “We have many exciting ideas coming up…not just drones, but solving other big problems, too. I’m excited for it.”