Mark
Chiappetta

Most executives change course when the product fails. Mark Chiappetta changed course when it worked. Soft Robotics made good grippers - soft, food-safe, air-powered pincers that could handle a raw chicken thigh without bruising it. The trouble was not the hardware. The trouble was that the customers he wanted, the food processors running high-speed lines, were not lining up to rip out human labor and bolt in robots.

So in 2024 he did something unusual for a newly minted CEO. He took the top job at Soft Robotics in February, and then presided over its disassembly: the gripper hardware business was sold off, and the company's 3D vision and machine-learning software - a stack called mGripAI - was spun into a new, independent company called Oxipital AI. Chiappetta kept the same title in the new outfit. The name Soft Robotics, in effect, became the thing he no longer sold.

The logic is almost boringly rational once you hear him say it. A food plant that installs a picking robot has crossed a one-way threshold. "Once you take out humans, it's hard to go back," he told The Robot Report. Vision is different. A camera that watches the line and flags defects does not require anyone to be laid off, does not require the plant to rethink its labor model, and can be sold today. Robots are a purchase a plant makes once it is ready. Vision is a purchase it can make now.

That reframing solves a problem Chiappetta had been living with for years. "Without focus, it's difficult to survive," he said. "I had many conversations with strategic partners who didn't know how to look at a company that's eyes, hands, and brains." Being all three at once made Soft Robotics hard to categorize and hard to bet on. Oxipital AI is one thing: the eyes and the brains. The hands can come from anyone - the software is built to run on existing industrial robot arms and automation gear.

There is also a quieter business point buried in the switch. "Soft Robotics' business was 100% dependent on robot sales," Chiappetta noted, "but Oxipital's won't be." A company whose revenue rides entirely on selling expensive hardware into a hesitant market is fragile. A company that sells software - inspection, defect detection, counting, measurement - has more ways to make money and fewer ways to stall.

Chiappetta is an electrical engineer first. He earned a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Rhode Island and did further study at New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering. The career that followed reads like a tour of what robots have actually been asked to do over three decades: vacuum a living room floor at iRobot, restore motion to a human leg at BionX, and grade a poultry line at Soft Robotics and Oxipital AI.

The through-line is not the machines. It is the pattern of joining hard technical problems and staying long enough to turn them into a business. At iRobot he ran advanced systems and technology and helped steer acquisitions. At BionX he led a turnaround. At Soft Robotics he was employee-grade founding technical leadership who ended up in the corner office.

That last part matters more than the org chart suggests. Chiappetta has worked with former Soft Robotics CEO Jeff Beck for more than 15 years across multiple ventures. When Beck handed off, he described Chiappetta as "the perfect leader" for the company's next phase. In a small industry where the same names surface across companies, that kind of long partnership is its own form of capital.

Oxipital AI today runs roughly 110 people out of 32 Crosby Drive in Bedford, Massachusetts. It has raised on the order of $84 million across its rounds, most recently a Series C. Its promise to a customer is not a robot uprising. It is a web-based dashboard, a no-code interface for setting quality rules, and a set of pre-trained object models that a plant can point at its line and put to work - inspection first, automation later, on the customer's timetable rather than the vendor's.

It is a patient bet. The flashy version of food robotics is the arm that picks and places. Chiappetta's version is the camera that watches, learns, and reports - the part of the system that a nervous industry will actually buy. He spent years being eyes, hands, and brains. Now he is selling the eyes, and betting the hands will follow.