robots-as-a-service
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Mark Messina
Mark Messina is Managing Director and CEO of ANSCER Robotics Americas, the U.S. arm of a Bengaluru-based hybrid autonomous mobile robot company. With more than 25 years across engineering, manufacturing and operations, he helped build the modern warehouse-robot industry from the inside - joining Amazon during the Kiva Systems acquisition, later working on Amazon Prime Air drones, IoT at Mattel, and leading U.S. expansions for Geek+ and Addverb. He now runs ANSCER's Austin, Texas headquarters, championing a frugal, ROI-first approach to robotics and a Robots-as-a-Service model built to put automation within reach of small operators.
Josh Gruenstein
Josh Gruenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Tutor Intelligence, an MIT CSAIL spinout building AI-powered robots that work alongside people in American factories and warehouses. He leases robots by the hour instead of selling them, betting that fleet-scale learning, not bigger algorithms, is what finally puts a robot in every factory. In December 2025 the company raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $42M.
Clinton Smith
Clinton Smith is Co-Founder and CEO of RIOS Intelligent Machines, a Menlo Park-based robotics and AI company deploying dexterous robots in factories across industries like wood products, food, and beverage distribution. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer with a Ph.D. on laser spectrometers for wireless trace-gas sensing, he spent years at Xerox PARC and Physical Sciences Inc. before co-founding RIOS in 2018 with fellow PARC engineers. Under his leadership, RIOS has raised $37.5M total including a $13M Series B in March 2024 co-led by Yamaha Motor Corp. and IAG Capital Partners, pioneering a Robots-as-a-Service model that shifts CapEx burden away from manufacturers and promises outcomes from day one.