Source: Rob Spiegel, Senior Editor, DesignNews

The Boston-based MassRobotics nurtures robot companies, accelerates their growth, and matches them up with venture capital.

At a Glance

• While MassRobotics is located in Boston, the hub supports robotics acceleration and adoption globally.
• New England Venture Capital Association has worked closely with MassRobotics to find investment opportunities.
• After 18 months at MassRobotics, Realtime Robotics moved into a 12,000-square-foot facility.

MassRobotics is an independent robotics hub dedicated to accelerating robotics innovation, commercialization, and adoption. The goal of MassRobotics is to help create and scale the next generation of successful robotics by providing entrepreneurs and startups with the workspace, resources, programming, and connections needed to develop, prototype, test, and commercialize their products and solutions. 

By supporting the development and commercialization of cutting-edge robotics, MassRobotics accelerates robotics automation from healthcare to manufacturing. Programs, such as the MassRobotics Accelerator, support early-stage companies with funding, tailored guidance, and opportunities to connect with investors and strategic partners.

The hub was created to give new companies the space, structure, and community to develop products and systems, and to find financial and technological support. “The mission of MassRobotics is to help create and scale the next generation of successful robotics and AI technology companies,” Joyce Sidopoulos, co-founder & chief of operations at MassRobotics, told Design News. “MassRobotics provides entrepreneurs and startups with the workspace, resources, programming, and connections needed to develop, prototype, test, and commercialize products and solutions.”

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Boston is a strong center for technology with some of the strongest technology research institutions nearby. That is handy, but the hub looks beyond Boston. “While MassRobotics is based in Boston, the hub supports robotics acceleration and adoption globally,” said Sidopoulos. “The hub works with startups, academia, industry, and governments both domestically and internationally.”

Creating challenge programs

As part of the support system for start-ups, MassRobotics has developed a range of activities designed to bring entrepreneurs in touch with potential customers and sources of financial support. “We have a lot of programs. We do a signature series – events where we match robots with specific industries such as construction, defense, or healthcare,” said Sidopoulos. “We bring in experts from industry and we have start-ups pitch on what they are working. It is like bringing together a curated group. Sometimes our sponsors bring a function, and we will do a challenge to our entrepreneurs to address the function. The sponsor helps to select which one they want to work on. A lot of times, those meetings are designed to be challenge. Someone trying to solve a particular problem.”

MassRobotics also brings potential customers to the hub to meet with entrepreneurs. “We also have corporate visits. We will set up a day-long visit where corporate representatives can visit robot companies in the community,” said  Sidopoulos. “There is also a big demand for robotics because there are not enough workers. That is true with robots in logistics and warehousing. VCs are willing to back these companies.”

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Connecting with venture capitalists

One of the match-making goals of MassRobotics is to find venture capitalists to invest in the hub’s start-ups. One venture capital group that has worked closely with MassRobotics is the New England Venture Capital Association (NEVCA). “The NEVCA  is the trade association representing the venture capital community. Our activities range from events to legislative advocacy,” Ari Glantz, executive director of New England Venture Capital Association, told Design News. “The NEVCA is about 40% in healthcare and 40% in B2B broadly. The remaining 20% covers frontier technology such as hard science robotics computation and biology.”

Venture capital investment is the lifeline for many of the companies that require capital to develop products. “MassRobots gives a home and supportive resources to companies that start with Ideas about what it takes to build a robotics company,” said Glantz. “There are a lot of obstacles. The path from idea to commercial viability is a chasm. In software that chasm can be overcome pretty quickly. Yet for ideas that require infrastructure, tools, and resources, the lack of that support prevents great ideas from become reality.”

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The robot mix by industry:

Glantz did note that some of the start-ups have been developing their products on a shoestring. “The beauty of the services of MassRobotics and its ecosystem is that it is flexible enough that you can come with a 3D printer the size of a desktop computer and scale to industrial factory grade industrial robot arms,” said Glantz. “That means the kind of entrepreneur that is variable runs the gambit.”

Aside from Silicon Valley, Boston may be the best area for producing start-up entrepreneurs. “Boston has this wealth of educational institutions. We see a healthy number of entrepreneurs coming out of college,” said Glantz. “We are also seeing senior managers who have learned the ropes of big companies and are ready to start their own. They look at MassRobotics as their bass layer.”

“Access to capital is what everybody struggles with. MassRobotics does an awesome job of making it easy for see what is going on there,” said Glantz. “If you ask MassRobotics what the biggest challenge is, it’s getting  capital for their clients.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are getting deployed in new robotics. AI is becoming a notable feature among the entrepreneurs at MassRobotics. “The robotics industry has been using AI for years. But now we’re seeing a whole range of new tools such as opensource AI and drone autonomy,” said Sidopoulos. “Companies are building their own AI models. AI is used by almost off of our companies, particularly in vision systems that detect obstacles, pick up objects, or conduct bin picking.”

AI in robotics can include autonomous robots for warehouses or delivery, machine learning on the factory floor, and inspection systems for quality control. “Machine learning for manufacturing is designed to look at things coming off factory lines, or a gripper that positions something in a certain way,” said Sidopoulos. “We taught a robot how to tie a shoe.”

Realtime Robotics: a case study of success

One of the MassRobotics success stories is Realtime Robotics. The company was founded with the goal of transforming how robots and autonomous vehicles move. The company develops cutting-edge software and hardware for collision-free motion planning, enabling robots to operate efficiently in dynamic environments across multiple industries. While Realtime Robotics is headquartered in Boston, the company now has offices in Europe and Asia.

Realtime Robotics signed up with MassRobotics shortly after the hub launched. “Back in May 2017, just before I geared up to find a spot in Boston to settle our three-person team, I stumbled onto an article about the very recent formation of MassRobotics (MR). I immediately called the number and caught up with Joyce [Sidopoulos],” Peter Howard, co-founder and CEO of Realtime Robotics told Design News. “She took me for a video tour of the space. The city had given them a considerable break on robots, the lab, and maker space. The cost to us was incredibly low. So we got started there.”

The tools Realtime needed to launch were mostly available at MassRobotics. “We had $50k of funding to get started, and that funding would have gone straight out the window if we’d had to buy robots, desks, and tools,” said Howard. “All we needed to get to work were our computers. That $50k lasted about five months, long enough to land our first contracts with Amazon and Samsung and raise a $2M seed round anchored by Toyota.”

The next big break for Realtime came through one of the MassRobotics events. “At the end of our first year, we had just built an amazing demonstration of our technology when Mitsubishi Electric came through on a visibility tour,” said Howard. “They were immediately excited by what they saw. Very shortly thereafter, they contracted with us to port our technology to their robotics product line. They joined our Series A round as an anchor investor and became an important MR sponsor organization.”

The success sent Realtime Robotics off to their own facility. “We ‘graduated’ from MR after about 18 months and moved into 12,000-square-feet of space not far away,” said Howard. “We’ve continued to maintain a low-profile ‘membership’ at MR, and use their facilities for off-site brainstorming, for demonstrations, and just to stay in touch with the vibrant community it has become.”

Working with a wide range of entrepreneurs

MassRobotics works with entrepreneurs that range from college-age engineers to executives from tech companies. “We have entrepreneurs right out of school. They come to build robots even before they have a customer. We also get entrepreneurs from large companies,” Sidopoulos. “We get professors who are commercializing their research. They have cool technology. Healthcare became a big market for us because of COVID.”

While MassRobotics draws from Boston’s intellectual and technology communities, not all of the hubs entrepreneurs are local. “Many of our companies are not from Massachusetts. Fifty percent are not from Massachusetts, 25% are not from the US,” said Sidopoulos. “Yet there’s an advantage of being from the melting pot of Boston. Our culture is similar to Europe with a high density of academics. We have a lot of talent. A lot of industries come to Boston for our natural resource, the intellect.”

MassRobotics receives its support from industry. “We are independent, funded by industry through an annual sponsorship fee. Our supporters get access to our start-ups. They run challenges. They feel tied into the ecosystem,” said Sidopoulos. ”We target some industries. We look for those who can add to our ecosystem. When we started, it was just a couple of us sitting around table with zero funding.”