embodied-ai
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Lei Xu Is Teaching Cars to See - Then Asking What Sight Is For
The former Tesla Vision engineer built Nullmax around a stubbornly practical idea: autonomous driving only matters when the software can leave the demo, fit the car and survive the road.
Ananth Kashyap Is Teaching AI to Get Its Hands Dirty
The Sureform founder started with a high-school iOS app and arrived at a harder question: how do you teach AI what real work feels like? His answer begins in the wonderfully untidy places where people already know what to do.
Allen Pan Is Teaching Factories to Change Their Minds
After engineering autonomous systems at General Motors and advanced factory automation at Tesla, Allen Pan is betting that the useful factory of the future will not merely run. It will learn, adjust and run again.
Apurva Shah Builds Worlds Where Robots Can Fail First
After two decades making digital worlds believable, the former Pixar technical leader is using simulation to make machines more dependable in the real one.
Zakariea Sharfeddine
Zakariea Sharfeddine is the co-founder and CEO of InLoop Robotics (YC P26), a startup building AI-native warehouse fulfillment powered by robotic arms you hire by the month. A KIT-trained informatics engineer who did machine learning work at Bosch and BMW and reinforcement learning research at RoboTUM, he now leads a team deploying bimanual robots that pack, kit, and fulfill orders, with remote human operators stepping in on edge cases so the line never stops.
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Jackie Wu
Jackie Wu is the founder and CEO of Corvus Robotics, a company that builds fully autonomous drones that fly indoors and count warehouse inventory without beacons, GPS, Wi-Fi, or a human at the controls. A Northwestern-trained roboticist who spent time inside warehouses on four continents, he grew tired of watching people climb ladders with clipboards and barcode guns, and decided to teach a drone to do it instead. Corvus designs and manufactures its drones in California, went through Y Combinator, and raised a Series A in 2024 to push warehouses toward a lights-out future.
Jad Tarifi
Jad Tarifi is the co-founder, CEO and Chief AI Scientist of Integral AI, a Tokyo- and Silicon Valley-based startup building energy-efficient, interactive world models aimed at scalable artificial general intelligence and embodied robotics. Before founding the company in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Google, where he founded and led the company's first generative AI team and worked on neocortex-inspired learning from limited data. Born and raised in Lebanon, he holds a PhD in computer science and AI from the University of Florida and an MS in quantum computing. In December 2025 he drew global attention - and skepticism - by claiming Integral AI had built the world's first AGI-capable model, TOWA. He is also the author of the four-volume 'Freedom Series' on AI and human potential.
Sebastian Peralta
Sebastian Peralta is a physicist-turned-roboticist and co-founder of Mbodi AI, a New York startup teaching industrial robots new skills through plain language and quick demonstrations instead of weeks of reprogramming. A former core engineer on Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8) with a triple major in electrical engineering, computer science, and physics from UPenn, he builds embodied-AI systems where one robot's lesson instantly becomes the whole fleet's. Mbodi won ABB Robotics' global AI Startup Challenge, reached the Startup Battlefield Top 20 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, and is rolling out factory deployments with a Fortune 100 consumer-goods partner.
Deepak Pathak
Deepak Pathak is the co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, the Pittsburgh robotics company building a single general-purpose 'brain' that can run any robot from a quadruped to a humanoid. A Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he earned a gold medal at IIT Kanpur and a PhD at UC Berkeley before betting that physical intelligence, not language, is the real path to AGI. In January 2026 Skild raised $1.4 billion at a valuation north of $14 billion, backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.
Rajat Bhageria
Rajat Bhageria is the founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based company building AI-enabled robotic systems for flexible food assembly automation. After founding accessibility tech startup ThirdEye (acquired 2017) and co-founding pre-seed VC fund Prototype Capital, Bhageria launched Chef Robotics in 2019 to tackle the labor crisis in food manufacturing. The company has deployed robots across 12+ facilities in the US, Canada, and Europe, completing over 100 million food servings as of April 2026, backed by $72.7M in total funding. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), Bhageria is also a published scientist, author, and prolific writer with bylines in Forbes, TechCrunch, and HuffPost.
Lindon Gao
Lindon Gao is the co-founder and CEO of Dyna Robotics, a Redwood City-based company building commercially deployed foundation model robots for real-world automation. After immigrating from China at age 11, he attended Stuyvesant High School and NYU Stern before pivoting from Goldman Sachs investment banking to entrepreneurship. He co-founded Caper AI, an AI-powered smart grocery cart company acquired by Instacart for $350 million in 2021. In 2024, he left Instacart to launch Dyna Robotics alongside York Yang and former Google DeepMind scientist Jason Ma. Within a year, Dyna raised $143.5 million in total funding, achieved a $600 million valuation, and deployed robots folding napkins and handling laundry for 16 hours daily at hotels, restaurants, gyms, and laundromats — backed by NVIDIA, Amazon, Salesforce Ventures, and First Round Capital.
Thomas Tang
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.
Anthony Jules
Anthony Jules is the Co-founder and CEO of Robust.AI, a San Carlos, California company building AI-powered collaborative robots for warehouse and logistics operations. A 30-year technology veteran originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Jules began coding at age 11, earned degrees in Computer Science from MIT, and helped scale Sapient Corporation from 3 to 4,000 employees. After co-founding Redwood Robotics (acquired by Google), he led robotics product programs at Google X's Everyday Robot project, then co-founded Robust.AI in 2019 alongside robotics legend Rodney Brooks. The company's Carter robot - which uses eight cameras and no lidar - achieved a 60% productivity increase at DHL Supply Chain on day one, and recently partnered with Foxconn for manufacturing scale-up.