Research Scientist NVIDIA
Dr. Jim Fan is the co-Lead of Generalist Embodied Agent Group (GEAR) at NVIDIA. GEAR’s mission is to build generally capable Physical AI. Dr. Fan’s team is spearheading Project GR00T, NVIDIA’s moonshot initiative at building the AI brain for humanoid robotics. Previously, Dr. Fan obtained his Ph.D. degree at Stanford Vision Lab. His publications have won several awards and nominations, including the Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. He spearheaded multiple impactful works on robot foundation models, AI gamers that play Minecraft proficiently, and general-purpose agents that learn to operate a computer. His works have been widely featured in news media, such as New York Times, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, The WIRED, VentureBeat, etc.
CEO The Bot Company
Kyle Vogt is the Founder and CEO of The Bot Company, a robotics startup making affordable household robots. He previously founded Cruise, which was sold to GM for $1 billion and ultimately completed 250,000 driverless rides. Previously, Vogt was a cofounder of Twitch. He studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT.
Founder & CEO Rivian
RJ Scaringe founded Rivian in 2009 to help accelerate the world’s shift toward carbon neutral energy and transportation. Since starting Rivian from a clean sheet, he’s led the company to establish its vertically integrated technology platforms, build multi-program manufacturing capabilities, develop meaningful partnerships and set forth a strategic vision that transcends the profound change we’ll see within the transportation industry over the next few decades. An engineer at heart, RJ has meticulously built a diverse team obsessed with tackling hard problems while fostering an environment that rewards courage, creativity and teamwork. He operates from the belief that the only way to build the kind of world our kids’ kids deserve is through collaboration, not only within organizations, but also across industries and society. Today, Rivian develops and manufactures electric vehicles and charging infrastructure for the consumer and commercial markets. Rivian’s nearly $14 billion IPO in 2021 was the largest worldwide since 2014. Rivian’s first consumer products, the R1T and R1S, have received critical acclaim, including the R1T named MotorTrend’s Truck of the Year for 2022; and both the R1T and R1S earning the highest safety rating of Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) for 2023 and 2024. Most recently, Rivian was named the Best Luxury Brand of 2024 by US News and World Report. Rivian is also currently fulfilling Amazon's order for 100,000 electric delivery vans—the largest single order for commercial EVs ever placed.
Co-founder & CEO Foxglove
Adrian Macneil is the CEO and co-founder of Foxglove, a company dedicated to increasing the GDP of robotics through foundational tools and infrastructure. Foxglove’s powerful visualization and data management accelerates robotics development from prototype to production. Prior to founding Foxglove, Adrian was the Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Cruise, where he helped scale from the first prototypes to hundreds of vehicles on the road.
Chief Scientist Wayve
Jamie leads Wayve’s Science department, where he guides our research teams to unlock new research breakthroughs, to enable those breakthroughs to have meaningful impact for the business, and to disrupt both our technical and business strategy to ensure Wayve stays at the forefront of innovation. Before Wayve, Jamie was Partner Director of Science at Microsoft and Head of the Mixed Reality & AI Labs, where he shipped foundational features for Microsoft’s Kinect (Microsoft’s line of motion sensing input devices) and the hand- and eye-tracking that enable HoloLens 2’s interaction model (smart glasses). With a PhD in computer vision from the University of Cambridge, Jamie is a highly accomplished researcher and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021.
Director of Software and Autonomy Cobot
Heidi leads the Software and Autonomy team at Cobot to make Proxie trustworthy and adaptable. She has more than 20 years of experience developing software solutions to challenging problems. Previous roles include leading the Amazon Prime Air Drone ground station team and leading the autonomy software for Amazon Astro. Heidi has a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Stanford Aerospace Robotics Lab.
Director of Deployment Success Cobot
A highly skilled program manager with a specialization in robotics and systems deployment. Jess excels in creating scalable processes, implementing automation technology, and optimizing supply chain operations. She has a strong customer-facing background, having worked at 6 River Systems/Shopify, Home Depot, and Manhattan Associates. In her most recent role at 6 River Systems, she established a technical operations PMO, driving standardization and process improvement, while overseeing a global portfolio of 100+ robotic deployments, showcasing her expertise in managing complex projects. Jess brings this experience to Cobot, as Director of Deployment Success overseeing all field implementations of Proxie.
Founder/CEO Mytra
Chris is the CEO and co-founder of Mytra, a robotics company developing a universal material flow system for warehousing and manufacturing. Automating material flow addresses 80% of the work in warehousing and 30% of the work in manufacturing. In 2 years Mytra has developed and launched to production their class-leading system, earned multiple large scale contracts from Tier 1 customers, and secured 3 rounds of funding totaling $78M led by Eclipse and Greenoaks. Prior to Mytra Chris spent 7 years at Tesla. Most recently he was the first leader of Tesla’s Optimus/Humanoid robotics company where in a year he built the initial team and first 2 prototypes, including a walking robot within the first 3 months. Prior to Optimus he led Tesla’s mobile robotics team developing internal products for material conveyance and automated logistics, led the deployment of the automated material conveyance system for Model 3 General Assembly (the #2 bottleneck for Model 3 ramp), and led product for Tesla’s Supercharger (charging infrastructure) team. Prior to Tesla Chris founded a venture-backed software company acquired by Raise.com in 2014. He spent his first 8 years bringing new products to market in renewable energy at Acciona and at Accenture. Chris has an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds six patents across robotics and energy domains.
Co-founder & CEO Skild AI
Deepak Pathak is CEO & Co-Founder of Skild AI and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University working on developing an AI foundation model for robotics. He is known for pioneering contributions to AI including self-supervised learning, artificial curiosity and sim2real adaptation for robot learning. Deepak has received several prestigious honors including Sloan Fellow, MIT TR 35under35, Okawa Fellow, IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award and multiple Best Paper Awards. Deepak's research has been featured in popular press outlets, including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Quanta Magazine, Washington Post, CNET, Wired, and MIT Technology Review among others. Earlier, he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and his Bachelor's from IIT Kanpur with a Gold Medal in Computer Science.
Co-founder & CEO Bedrock Robotics
Boris Sofman is the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics, an SF-based company focused on enabling fully self-operating heavy machinery (enabled by a fairly inexpensive upfit) to drive improvements in the cost, schedule, safety, and predictability of projects. Before Bedrock Robotics, Boris was an executive at Waymo, where he led autonomous trucking as well as key core technologies in the push to launch autonomous cars to the public in the Waymo One ride-hailing network. Waymo robo-taxis have driven over 50 million driverless miles across 4 cities at superhuman levels of safety. Previously, Boris co-founded and led Anki, a consumer robotics company known for its innovative entertainment products. Boris holds a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Senior Director, Head of Autonomy Serve Robotics
Rajesh Radhakrishnan is an AI and robotics leader with over 15 years’ experience spanning agricultural robotics, biotech, human–computer interaction, and mobility. He was the first co-founding engineer at Blue River Technology, where he built breakthrough AI and computer-vision technology that led to the largest-ever agricultural robotics acquisition by John Deere. At John Deere, Rajesh held multiple leadership roles and was part of the founding team that started the autonomous tractor group, scaling it from just six people to a major business unit and launching the company’s first autonomous tractors to market in three years. Today, he spearheads last-mile delivery innovation at Serve Robotics (Nasdaq: SERV) while advising and investing in emerging robotics startups.
Founder Copper Robotics
Guillaume Binet, Founder of Copper Robotics, brings 25 years of tech experience, with 10 years focused on robotics. Before founding Copper Robotics, he was the CTO at Skyways (drones), VP of CORE Platforms at Motional (autonomous driving), and VP of Onboard Infrastructure at Argo AI (autonomous driving). When Guillaume is not working heads down on his startup, he likes to restore old electronics (family computers and pinballs), scuba dive and race cars.