Scaling Robotics

In Episode 12, we speak with one of my favorite founders in robotics! Today, Edward Mehr, CEO and Founder of Machina Labs, joins us for Scaling Robotics. Machina builds RoboCraftsman, a 40-by-30-foot dual-arm robotic cell that forms sheet metal by pinching and incrementally deforming it, the way a potter shapes clay. The same cell drops its forming end effector to trim, scan, and soon heat treat a...

In Episode 11, we speak with Daniel Kirstein, co-founder of Holdfast Partners, a consultancy that helps robotics and hard tech companies build their financial and commercial infrastructure. Before Holdfast, Daniel was Head of Finance at Voyage (the autonomous vehicle company acquired by Cruise) and CFO at FarmWise, an agtech company building autonomous weeding machines, where he also ran sales, pr...

In Episode 10, we speak with Matthew Lee, who has spent the last decade running field operations and sustainment at three autonomy companies: Aurora (on-road autonomous trucks), Phantom Auto (teleoperated forklifts), and most recently Scythe Robotics (autonomous commercial lawnmowers, deployed across 20+ states). Before robotics, he spent two decades in automotive repair, working his way up from t...

This Episode In Episode 8, we speak with Cem Ersoz, Director of Robotics Software at Simbe Robotics. Simbe builds Tally, an autonomous retail robot that scans millions of shelves per week, giving retailers real-time visibility into product availability, out-of-stocks, and shelf accuracy. With thousands of Tallys deployed across major retailers in more than 10 countries, operating daily alongside u...

This Episode In Episode 7, we speak with Saman Farid, Co-founder and CEO of Formic . Formic is a Robots as a Service (RaaS) company that owns, deploys, and manages robot fleets inside U.S. manufacturing facilities, with robots actively running in production across more than 100 factories and on track to become the largest independent robot fleet in the country. Before founding Formic, Saman co-fou...

In Episode 6, we speak with Ritukar Vijay , Co-founder and CEO of Ottonomy . Ottonomy builds autonomous indoor-outdoor delivery robots for enterprises across healthcare, logistics, aerospace, and more. Before founding Ottonomy, Ritukar spent 16 years in autonomy, leading BMW's L4 self-driving program at Aptiv and building everything from defense UGVs to warehousing robots, with 57+ patents to...

In Episode 5, we speak with Usman Khan , Founding Engineer at Aigen . Aigen builds solar-powered autonomous rovers for agriculture, starting with mechanical weeding. We discuss why hardware, not software, is the real bottleneck holding back reliable robotics, how Aigen designs to tight constraints from day one instead of falling into the "we'll optimize later" trap that prevents scal...

In Episode 4, we speak with  Ashutosh Saxena , CEO and Founder of Torque AGI . Torque builds robotic foundation models for Fortune 100 companies like John Deere . Previously, Ashutosh took a company public and got his PhD under Andrew Ng at Stanford. He's also our first guest with a Wikipedia page ! We discuss the gap between demos and production autonomy, why physics-grounded AI reaches relia...

In Episode 3, we speak with  Amit Moran , former CTO of Civ Robotics (construction robots for solar) and co-founder of Indoor Robotics (autonomous indoor drones for security). We discuss what it actually takes to scale robot fleets from a CTO's perspective: designing for modularity, setting BOM targets from day one, building self-healing systems, and saving data you don't yet know you'...

In episode 2, we speak with Matan Yemini, a seasoned operator with over a decade of experience in drones and industrial automation at teams such as Amazon Robotics/Prime Air and Airobotics. He is now the COO at Rebellion Defense. In this episode, we discuss pragmatic lessons from scaling fleets and delivering real ROI for robotics customers. The insights are often unglamorous, but they require att...

Joining us in Episode 1 is Joshua Chaitin-Pollak , an industry veteran in robotics. He was formerly: An early software engineer at Kiva Systems , which was later acquired by Amazon, and is now Amazon Robotics . They've now deployed over 1 million robots, making them the largest robot fleet in the world. Software lead at 6 River Systems , acquired by Shopify , and now spun out to Ocado . Software l...