autonomous-robots
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Tom Yeshurun
Tom Yeshurun is the co-founder and CEO of Civ Robotics, a San Francisco construction-technology company building autonomous robots that automate land surveying and site layout. A civil engineer by training who managed a $100 million road project in Israel before founding the company, Yeshurun watched surveyors spend millions marking coordinates by hand in desert heat and set out to automate the task. Civ Robotics' CivDot robots now stake out survey points with roughly 8-millimeter accuracy and mark up to 3,000 points a day, and its technology has been deployed on solar projects representing more than 20 gigawatts of capacity. In July 2025 the company raised a $7.5 million Series A led by AlleyCorp.
Matthew Brown
Matthew Brown is the founder and CEO of ThoughtForge AI, a Berkeley robotics company building a cloud-based control platform that gives existing industrial robots real-time adaptivity and human-level dexterity using Active Inference, a biologically-inspired approach drawn from neuroscience. Over more than two decades in AI, he wrote combat logic for the Aegis system at Lockheed Martin, built the enemy intelligence behind game franchises like Halo, Bioshock, and Splinter Cell, and was the first engineer at Bonsai AI, where he helped ship one of the world's first production deep reinforcement learning platforms before Microsoft acquired it in 2018. He now teaches and sits on the board of the Active Institute while ThoughtForge works with manufacturers like bp, Siemens, and members of the ARM Institute to bring common sense to the factory floor.
Mohan Sivam
Mohan Sivam is the founder and CEO of Neuralzome Cybernetics, a Bengaluru deeptech startup teaching robots to drive themselves across orchards, farms and job sites no GPS map can describe. His pitch is deceptively plain: robots should learn by watching a human do the job once, not by waiting on a team of PhDs to code every turn. Neuralzome's NeuralPilot autonomy stack, RedPill simulation engine and rugged Jeeno platform aim to put off-road robots to work where labor is scarce and the terrain is unforgiving. In August 2025 the company raised $2.4M in pre-seed funding led by 8X Ventures. A serial builder who previously co-founded Flo Mobility and ran GAMASOME, Sivam describes his mission with a phrase that sticks: making robots sentient.
Simon Kalouche
Simon Kalouche is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a San Francisco-based robotics company that builds fully autonomous AI-powered fulfillment centers. A mechanical engineering graduate of Ohio State and robotics master's graduate of Carnegie Mellon, Kalouche invented the first low-cost quasi-direct-drive actuators in 2016 - a breakthrough that catalyzed robots from MIT's Mini Cheetah to Tesla Optimus. He left his Stanford PhD under Fei-Fei Li to commercialize the technology and has since built Nimble into a billion-dollar company with $231M in total funding, a landmark FedEx partnership, and a board that includes Marc Raibert (Boston Dynamics founder) and Sebastian Thrun (Google X founder).