Bogdan Cristei

The OPTIM Update

Technology EN ↓ 6 episodes

Deep conversations with the founders, investors, and operators building real-world AI - robotics, automation, industrial systems & AI infrastructure. Past the headlines, into how these technologies are really built, deployed, and scaled. Hosted by Bogdan Cristei, venture partner and former systems engineer.

Author

Bogdan Cristei

Episodes

Building the Missing Data Layer for Physical AI | James Kujareevanich, Vision Lab 16.06.2026 25:13

James Kujareevanich is the co-founder and CEO of Vision Lab - building the missing data layer for physical AI. They go into factories, capture first-person video of real operators performing real tasks, and turn that into structured training data for frontier labs and robotics companies. The origin story starts with an MIT PhD student who strapped a camera to his head to automate lab documentation...

Building the Foundry for Physical AI | Mike Xia, Anvil Robotics 25.05.2026 43:12

Mike Xia is the co-founder and CEO of Anvil Robotics - building the foundry for physical AI. They make the hardware, software, and data tools that let robotics teams go from zero to model training in days vs months. They've shipped over 100 robots, manufacture in Taiwan, and just raised a $6.5M seed round. Mike gets into the economics of building and shipping a $5,000 arm, why most teams are fight...

Useful Now: The Case for Application-Specific Robots | Arjun Subramaniam of Factory Intelligence 13.05.2026 42:15

Arjun Subramaniam is the founder and CEO of Factory Intelligence - a physical AI company training tactile foundation models for industrial manipulation. He's toured 70+ factories, deployed robots on real shop floors, and is making the contrarian bet that application-specific systems beat humanoids and general-purpose foundation models right now. His first workcell has eight robots building electri...

Why the World's Most Advanced Factories Are Still Flying Blind | Jared O'Leary, SirenOpt 16.04.2026 46:42

Jared O'Leary, Co-Founder and CEO of SirenOpt, breaks down why even the world's most advanced factories are still flying blind - and what a physics breakthrough out of UC Berkeley is doing about it. We cover what advanced manufacturing actually is and why it's different from anything most people picture, the sensing gap that's been gating progress for decades, and what cold atmospheric plasma reve...

Why Heavy Industrial Work Demands a Different Kind of Robot | Gary Chen & Conley Oster, Raise Robotics 17.03.2026 41:46

Gary Chen and Conley Oster are co-founders of Raise Robotics - they build mobile manipulators for construction sites, steel fabrication facilities, and shipyards. Environments where the work is genuinely dangerous, the labor shortage is acute, and the dominant solution being pitched to investors right now - humanoid robots - may be fundamentally the wrong answer. In this episode we cover: What it...

How AI Models for Robotics Are Really Built, Deployed, and Sold | Dr. Asad Tirmizi, Trener Robotics 06.03.2026 48:56

Dr. Asad Tirmizi, Co-Founder and CEO of Trener Robotics, breaks down the full lifecycle of AI in industrial robotics. We cover how models are actually built - the training pipelines, the data, and what separates people who've done it from people who've read about it. Then we get into deployment reality - what happens when AI hits a real factory floor. And we close with the part nobody wants to dis...