manipulation
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Parametric
Parametric is a San Francisco robotics company building autonomous physical businesses - operations that run themselves. Starting with a wash-and-fold laundromat, its bimanual mobile robots use reinforcement learning to fold, sort, and handle laundry, learning new behaviors on-site from customer feedback in under an hour. The team applies frontier-lab techniques - dense reward models, an RLHF-style feedback loop, and interpretability tools borrowed from language research - to physical work, reporting 3x higher task reliability than leading baseline models on matched hardware.
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.