We at Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) are bullish on robotics and have been early and active investors in the space starting with our early investments in Kiva Systems, Vention, TerraFirma, Gather AI and others. We are on the cusp of a massive revolution in robotics across a range of industries and use cases - healthcare, construction, logistics, and manufacturing. The vast majority of these startups will have form factors that are not humanoids - and in this piece I explain why: https://lnkd.in/evShi_gJ
Tim Schigel
4mo
That's a great distinction. We tend to anthropomorphize (big word alert!) by default, assuming the 'ultimate' machine must look like us. But that projection can be a trap. Unless the robot needs to use tools designed exclusively for human hands, the humanoid form factor is usually just unnecessary complexity. Great breakdown! Endless opportunities for innovation and advance HUMAN flourishing.
Josh Spaulding
4mo
Thanks for sharing this, the ending is really what resonated for me because every robot is a tool and what the end customer does with it and the manipulators, safety, vision etc around it define success and efficiency. “But the real frontier of robotics isn’t about building machines that look like us—it’s about designing ones that quietly make our industries more efficient”
Beth Flippo
4mo
Spot on. The robotics revolution is happening in focused, high-impact hardware. That’s exactly what we’re building at DEXA (Drone Express) with our U.S.-made autonomous aircraft.
Brilliant op-ed and lays out the challenges facing rapid expansion of small-scale industrial robotics or home robotics very well. Only unknown is - are there startups that are close to solving the haptic or tactile puzzle and will that be the ChatGPT moment of robotics.
Incredible perspective — and completely aligned with what we’re seeing on the materials side. As robotics and AI systems accelerate into real-world environments, the bottleneck isn’t just compute…it’s reliability, durability, and energy efficiency at the materials level. Every new form factor creates new demands on batteries, sensors, and semiconductors. That’s where technologies like Forge Nano, Inc. Atomic Armor (ALD) come in. We’re working with partners across advanced manufacturing and automation to strengthen the components that make next-gen robotics possible — longer-life batteries, more resilient sensors, and higher-performance chips that can survive harsher duty cycles. Robotics will look very different in the next decade. The materials underneath them will too.