Tutor Intelligence builds AI-powered collaborative robots that pick, pack, and palletize alongside people on factory and warehouse floors. Born out of MIT's CSAIL, the company sells robots by the hour - a Robots-as-a-Service model that drops a working robot onto a line in days, not months, with no programming required. Its flagship Cassie handles infinite SKUs at up to 14 cases per minute, while Data Factory 1, a 100-robot facility in a renovated Watertown mill, trains the next generation of factory-ready robot AI on real-world data.
Chris Walti is co-founder and CEO of Mytra, the Brisbane, CA-based robotics company rebuilding industrial material flow from the software up. Before founding Mytra in 2022, he spent 7.5 years at Tesla leading Model 3 material flow engineering, building the company's internal mobile robotics team, and becoming the first lead of what would become the Optimus humanoid robot program. Mytra has since raised $198M in total funding including a $120M Series C in January 2026, and its 3D robotic storage systems are deployed at Albertsons distribution centers, delivering up to 88% labor hour savings versus conventional solutions.
Kargo is a San Francisco-based AI company building computer vision systems for warehouse loading docks. Its Kargo Tower and Kargo Lift hardware capture freight as it moves, reading labels, flagging damage, and feeding accurate, real-time inventory data into enterprise systems.
Arshan Poursohi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Third Wave Automation, a Union City, California-based robotics company building autonomous high-reach forklifts powered by a proprietary Shared Autonomy Platform. Drawing on research stints at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Google Robotics, and Toyota Research Institute, Poursohi co-founded Third Wave in 2018 with the conviction that warehouse automation should enhance - not replace - human judgment. The company has raised over $82 million from investors including Woven Capital (Toyota's growth fund), Norwest Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors, Qualcomm Ventures, and Zebra Technologies, and its TWA Reach forklifts now operate commercially in warehouses across the U.S.
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.
Anthony Jules is the Co-founder and CEO of Robust.AI, a San Carlos, California company building AI-powered collaborative robots for warehouse and logistics operations. A 30-year technology veteran originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Jules began coding at age 11, earned degrees in Computer Science from MIT, and helped scale Sapient Corporation from 3 to 4,000 employees. After co-founding Redwood Robotics (acquired by Google), he led robotics product programs at Google X's Everyday Robot project, then co-founded Robust.AI in 2019 alongside robotics legend Rodney Brooks. The company's Carter robot - which uses eight cameras and no lidar - achieved a 60% productivity increase at DHL Supply Chain on day one, and recently partnered with Foxconn for manufacturing scale-up.
Brad Porter is the Founder and CEO of Collaborative Robotics (Cobot), a Santa Clara-based startup building AI-powered collaborative robots designed to work alongside humans rather than replace them. After 14 years at Amazon — where he rose to VP of Robotics and Distinguished Engineer, deploying over 250,000 robots — Porter left to briefly serve as CTO at Scale AI before founding Cobot in May 2022. In under three years, he raised $140M in funding (including a $100M Series B led by General Catalyst in April 2024), launched the Proxie robot in November 2024, and signed customers including Mayo Clinic, Maersk, Moderna, and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Simon Kalouche is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a San Francisco-based robotics company that builds fully autonomous AI-powered fulfillment centers. A mechanical engineering graduate of Ohio State and robotics master's graduate of Carnegie Mellon, Kalouche invented the first low-cost quasi-direct-drive actuators in 2016 - a breakthrough that catalyzed robots from MIT's Mini Cheetah to Tesla Optimus. He left his Stanford PhD under Fei-Fei Li to commercialize the technology and has since built Nimble into a billion-dollar company with $231M in total funding, a landmark FedEx partnership, and a board that includes Marc Raibert (Boston Dynamics founder) and Sebastian Thrun (Google X founder).
Sam Lurye is the founder and CEO of Kargo, a San Francisco-based industrial AI company that installs computer-vision towers at warehouse loading docks to automatically capture, verify, and digitize freight data in real time. A Stanford electrical engineering dropout, Lurye left campus in 2019 after touring factories across the US and spotting a universal blind spot: every warehouse still tracked its most important physical transactions - trucks arriving, pallets moving, damages happening - on paper and memory. Kargo has since deployed over 1,000 sensor towers, grown its enterprise customer base from 3 to 45+ (including Mercedes-Benz, Tillamook, and Aurobindo), tripled annual revenue from 2024 to 2025, and raised a $42M Series B in December 2025.