soft-robotics
(2)
Mark Chiappetta
Mark Chiappetta is the president and CEO of Oxipital AI, a Bedford, Massachusetts company that builds AI-driven machine vision for factory lines that pick, count, and inspect food. He is an electrical engineer who spent 30-plus years in robotics, including a run as a corporate VP at iRobot and eight years growing Soft Robotics from an early gripper startup. In 2024 he took the top job at Soft Robotics, then engineered the pivot that spun the company's 3D vision and AI software into Oxipital AI while the gripper hardware business was sold off. His pitch is that food processors will not rip out human lines for robots overnight, so Oxipital sells the eyes and brains first and the hands later.
Tim Swift
Tim Swift is the founder and CEO of Roam Robotics, the San Francisco company building lightweight exoskeletons out of high-strength fabric and compressed air instead of heavy steel and motors. A UC Berkeley mechanical engineering PhD, he was one of the original three-person team that invented the Ekso exoskeleton at Ekso Bionics, then went to Otherlab before starting Roam in 2014. His bet: that wearable robots can weigh five pounds, cost a few thousand dollars, and be something a regular person buys to ski longer, hike farther, or move with less pain - not a tens-of-thousands-of-dollars hospital machine.