Brad
Porter

Building the Robot That Works in the Real World

Walk into a hospital supply room at Tampa General, a Maersk logistics hub, or Moderna's manufacturing floor, and you might spot Proxie - two arms, four wheels, sensors at eye level. It reacts to you. It waits. It picks, moves, and hands off with a reliability that most robots only manage in controlled demos. Brad Porter built that robot. And he built it by starting from a question that most robotics founders skip: what actually works in production, every day, when the stakes are real?

Porter is the Founder and CEO of Collaborative Robotics, known as Cobot, headquartered in Santa Clara, California. He founded it in May 2022 with a specific theory: the problem in robotics was never imagination or money. It was operational experience. The gap between a robot that works in a lab and one that holds up on a warehouse floor at 3am is enormous, and most founders have never stood on that floor long enough to feel it.

Porter had fourteen years of that experience. As VP of Amazon Robotics, he oversaw the deployment of more than 250,000 robots across Amazon's logistics network, led a team of over 10,000 people, and launched more than 50 products. He left Amazon in 2020 with a clearer picture than almost anyone alive of where robotics breaks down - and where it could go.

A Radio Shack Arm and a Hospital Hallway

The beginning is oddly specific. As a kid, Porter's parents gave him a Radio Shack Armatron - a cheap, plastic robotic arm controlled by two levers. He spent hours learning its mechanics, its constraints, the gap between what he wanted it to do and what it would actually do. That gap fascinated him more than the gadget itself.

Decades later, another specific moment. Porter was walking through the halls of Mayo Clinic with his father. He watched the staff move - nurses managing supply carts, technicians ferrying equipment, people doing repetitive physical tasks alongside high-skill patient care. The question hit him: what if robots handled the motion? Not to replace those workers. To free them for the work that required a human.

He took that observation and turned it into Cobot. Mayo Clinic became not just an inspiration but an actual early customer and Series B investor. That kind of alignment between founding story and business reality is rare. Porter engineered it deliberately.

Building the Machine Inside the Machine

Porter joined Amazon in 2007, seven years before the company would make robotics a public obsession. He rose through the engineering ranks to become a Distinguished Engineer - a title so exclusive at Amazon that only a handful of people hold it at any given time. By 2017, he was VP of Amazon Robotics, responsible for the physical automation of the entire Amazon logistics network.

Managing robots at that scale is different from deploying them. A robot that fails 0.1% of the time sounds reliable. Across 250,000 units handling millions of packages daily, that's catastrophic. Porter learned to think in systems, in failure modes, in the invisible margin between a robot that runs and a robot that scales. He absorbed Amazon's writing culture too - evidence-based narratives, not pitch decks. Clarity forced through the written word.

When COVID-19 hit, his team adjusted deployments faster than any organization of that size had any right to expect. That kind of operational reflexes doesn't come from reading about robotics. It comes from living inside the hard problems for fourteen years.

Porter left in 2020. He spent roughly two years as CTO at Scale AI before the founding itch became undeniable. In May 2022, he launched Cobot with a founding team and a thesis he had been testing in his head for years.

Proxie: Not a Gimmick. A Machine That Works.

In November 2024, Cobot publicly launched Proxie. Two arms. Four wheels. Sensors positioned at eye level - Scout Sense, the company calls it - giving the robot situational awareness that matches how humans navigate shared spaces. The mobility system, Glide 360, handles complex environments without requiring the warehouse to be redesigned around the robot.

The customer list is a statement of intent. Healthcare, logistics, pharma, defense - these are not demo-friendly environments. They are high-stakes, heavily regulated, unforgiving of failure. Porter chose hard customers on purpose. The same instinct that made him pursue real production challenges at Amazon pushed him toward customers who would expose every flaw in Proxie before it became a PR problem.

In December 2024, Cobot was featured in AWS CEO Matt Garman's re:Invent keynote. For a startup less than three years old, that kind of marquee placement marks something: the technology is working, and the right people have noticed.

"No. Simply Put, I Don't Believe in Humanoid Robots."

While Figure, 1X, Optimus, and a parade of humanoid startups chase billion-dollar valuations on demos of robots walking across stages, Porter has been consistent and blunt. Humanoids are the wrong form factor for most of the work that actually needs doing.

His argument isn't philosophical. It's operational. He ran the math at Amazon. He looked at use cases where a humanoid might help and found, repeatedly, that a different form factor served those use cases better - fewer constraints, lower cost, faster deployment, easier maintenance. The human shape is optimized for human environments. But most industrial and logistics environments are already being redesigned. You're not stuck with bipedal movement just because the building was built for people.

This is a credible critique, coming from the person who actually deployed robots at scale. It's not a marketing position. Porter ran the analysis with real data from real warehouses. Proxie's design - "human-capable, but not humanoid" - is the conclusion of that analysis, made physical.

$140M and the Right Names on the Cap Table

Cobot raised its $100M Series B in April 2024, led by General Catalyst. The round brought total funding to $140M in under three years - fast, but not reckless. The investor list reads like a deliberate strategy: Sequoia, Khosla, Lux Capital, Bison Ventures, Industry Ventures, and Mayo Clinic as both investor and customer. That last one matters. Alignment between money and deployment is rare in robotics. Porter built it in.

Porter did something unusual after the raise: he published Cobot's actual Series B pitch narrative on Medium. Not a summary. The narrative itself - evidence-based, Amazon-style, built to communicate clearly rather than impress. He attributes this directness to his Amazon training. Most founders would have kept it internal. Porter posted it publicly, inviting scrutiny.

Podcasts, Substack, and a Pitch Narrative Anyone Can Read

Porter runs a weekly podcast called "Top of Mind with Brad Porter" - two to five minutes per episode, covering leadership, automation, and building at the edge of physical AI. He writes a Substack newsletter. He maintains a prolific Medium presence with essays on robotics foundation models, humanoid robot failures, how to build or identify a great robotics startup, and the specific path to human-capable AI in robots.

This is not a visibility strategy. Porter writes and speaks because he has things to say that he can't find elsewhere - and that suggests he's operating in a space that the public conversation hasn't caught up to yet. The essays aren't promotional. They're working through hard problems in public.

He's also appeared at Robotics Summit, Nebius Robotics Summit 2025, RIL EDGES 2025, and in interviews with Siemens' startup podcast and Automate.org. The through-line in every appearance: specificity over hype, production experience over demos, trust over theatrical capability.

From Netscape to Proxie

• 1996 Netscape - Developed VRML extensions for Live3D and backend web server template language
• Late 1990s Platform Architect at Tellme Networks (voice search, later acquired by Microsoft)
• 2007 Joined Amazon as a senior engineer
• 2014 Named Amazon Distinguished Engineer - one of a handful company-wide
• 2017 Promoted to VP of Amazon Robotics; led 10,000+ people, deployed 250,000+ robots
• 2020 Left Amazon after 14 years; joined Scale AI as Chief Technology Officer
• May 2022 Founded Collaborative Robotics (Cobot) in Santa Clara, California
• April 2024 Closed $100M Series B led by General Catalyst; total funding reaches $140M
• November 2024 Launched Proxie - Cobot's first commercial robot for material handling
• December 2024 Cobot featured in AWS CEO Matt Garman's re:Invent 2024 keynote

Brad Porter on Video

• Why I Left Amazon to Launch a Robot Startup
• Cobot Introduces Proxie (Official Launch)
• Fireside Chat: The Future of Embodied AI - Nebius Robotics Summit 2025
• Pioneer Startup Podcast: Cobot Founder Brad Porter and the Race to Robotics
• RIL EDGES 2025: Fireside with Brad Porter
• From Amazon Robotics to Cobot: Building Robots That Actually Work