INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Every once in a while, a college student or recent graduate dares to launch a robotics startup and
everything goes as well as could be expected
Such is the case, for example, with Alex Rodrigues and Brandon Moak, two former University of Waterloo students who worked on self-driving
technologies together in college and formed their now venture-backed, self-driving truck company, Embark, instead of graduating
robotics investors, it helps to either have experience in a particular industry or to pull in someone, quickly, who does
previously, and where they are shopping now.
Though the three expressed interest in a wide range of technologies and plenty of optimism
thinking about hitting up investors in the not-too-distant future.
Quintini on how comfortable she and her colleagues at Lux are when it
comes to backing recent college graduates:
What we care the most about what is your unique insight and what do you know about tackling a
And so he actually understands the importance of safety and the selling of those systems to customers
Because he knew that, it made a big difference in how he approaches his go-to-market strategy and how he approaches building a product
and kind of force fit it, as opposed to people who understand a need and are using robotics as a tool to truly solve that need
versus industrial robots and whether it expects to commit more capital to one or the other
discussion:
Chiming in to what Renata and Rob were saying, you understated [the issue]
The majority of the teams that we are looking on both the consumer and industrial robot [worlds] at the moment are more of a technology
are fresh out of school, usually a supervising professor with a couple of his or her PhD students having come across some kind of
technological breakthrough in university and trying to commercialize that
But robotics are all about what sectors they are being applied to
