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The 10-Minute Robot Changeover: Southie Autonomy Wants the Line Lead to Run the Machines
Factories do not only need smarter robots. They need robots that can survive Tuesday afternoon - when the SKU changes, the labor roster thins, and nobody has time to call an integrator.
Jacobi Robotics
Jacobi Robotics is a UC Berkeley spinout building AI-powered motion planning software that lets industrial robot arms be programmed and deployed in under a day instead of a month. Its platform generates collision-free trajectories in under a millisecond, and its flagship product, the Jacobi OmniPalletizer, handles real-time mixed-case palletizing without pre-sequencing. Founded in 2022 and launched publicly in 2024 with a $5M seed round, the company partners with robotics providers like Formic and ABB to bring faster, cheaper automation to manufacturers and warehouses.
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.