Madrid to Munich to a pivot in Mountain View
Pablo Palafox studied robotics and electronics in Madrid. He was selected as one of 96 most promising university students in Spain - out of 5,000 candidates - for a program sponsored by twelve top multinationals. He received a postgraduate scholarship awarded to just 40 Spanish students studying abroad. He went to Munich.
At the Technical University of Munich, he earned his Master's with high distinction, working with professors Angela Dai and Matthias Niessner on visual understanding, scene flow, and autonomous systems. His published research covered topics from autonomous underwater vehicles to aerial landing - edge cases where machines must perceive and act in unforgiving environments.
Meta came calling for a summer internship in its VR division. Pablo went. He saw what the frontier of consumer AI looked like from inside one of its largest labs. He came back to Munich to finish his PhD. Then he didn't.
The founding team is a family trip
Luis Paarup met Pablo as undergraduates in Madrid. They both ended up at TUM. When Pablo left the PhD, Luis left too. They co-founded HappyRobot together. Luis is CTO.
Javier Palafox - Pablo's brother - joined as COO. He had been CFO at a $300M CPG brand, had worked at KPMG, had operated at the intersection of finance and supply chain. The Palafox family brings two different kinds of intelligence to the same table. That combination - deep technical vision and hard operational experience - is not accidental. It's structural.
Three Spaniards in San Francisco, two of them brothers. They entered Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch with a computer vision product they believed in. What happened next is a lesson in how good founders respond when the market disagrees with their thesis.
"We had like one customer that we thought it was a customer." - Pablo Palafox, on their first pivot attempt during YC