industrial-robotics
(5)
Daryl Lim
Daryl Lim is the co-founder and CEO of Augmentus, a no-code robotics company that lets factory operators program industrial robots by 3D-scanning a part instead of writing code or CAD. Founded in Singapore in 2019 and now US-headquartered near Austin, Texas, Augmentus targets surface finishing, sanding, welding and spray coating for high-mix manufacturing. A serial entrepreneur since his teens, Lim was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2022 and has raised roughly $16-17M across seed and Series A rounds, including an $11M round in July 2025.
Haojie Hu
Haojie Hu is the founder and CEO of LE Robotics (Loyalty Robotics Welding Systems), a Chinese company that fuses AI, 3D vision, and autonomous navigation to build welding robots that read a metal seam and start work in seconds without pre-programming. A second-generation industrialist who trained on his father's factory floor before earning degrees at NYU Stern and Columbia Business School, Hu returned from Wall Street to build what he calls a comprehensive ecosystem service provider for industrial embodied AI in metalworking. He was named to Forbes China's 2023 list of 100 Outstanding Overseas Returnees.
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.
Max Cao
Max Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Jacobi Robotics, an Emeryville, California startup building AI-first software that programs industrial robot arms up to 20x faster. A mechanical engineer trained at Imperial College London and UC Berkeley's BAIR Lab under Ken Goldberg, and a former McKinsey consultant, Cao left academia to attack a problem most people never see: the way robots are programmed has barely changed since the 1980s. Jacobi's motion-planning technology cuts deployment from a month to under a day, claims 1000x less compute, and handles the singularities that freeze robot arms mid-task. The company launched publicly in July 2024 with a $5M seed round led by Moxxie Ventures.
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.