6 robotics startups competing in RoboBusiness Pitchfire

The Pitchfire Startup Competition has been an opening-day highlight for years at RoboBusiness, which runs Oct. 16-17 in Santa Clara, Calif. Pitchfire, which happens on Oct. 16 from 4-4:45 PM at the Santa Clara Convention Center, is a must-attend event for investors, robotics entrepreneurs and innovation leaders alike.

Six robotics startups will compete this year for a $5,000 first-place prize. Each startup gets five minutes to describe their company’s solution, business model, value proposition and more. After all the contestants have pitched, Pitchfire judges will compare notes, reach a consensus, and announce a winner based on who they believe to be best primed for commercial success.

Companies that have previously competed in Pitchfire include Glidance, Tatum Robotics, Southie Autonomy, Sadako Technologies, Autonomous Marine Systems, inVia Robotics, Catalina Health, Cubit, Rokid, RightHand Robotics, Soft Robotics and Knightscope. Last year’s winner, Glidance, recently raised a $1.5 million seed round.

New to this year’s Pitchfire event, each of the startups will be exhibiting in the Startup Showcase on the RoboBusiness expo floor. Judges for the competition are Lisa Chai, general partner, Interwoven Ventures; Rugved Hattekar, senior lidar software developer, Luminar; Ellen Chisa, partner, boldstart ventures; Eric Truebenbach, managing director, Teradyne Robotics Ventures; Ted Larson, CEO, OLogic.

RoboBusiness is the leading event for the commercial robotics ecosystem. There will be 70-plus speakers, 70-plus exhibitors and demos on the expo floor, networking receptions and much more.

Here is a look at this year’s participants:

Copper Robotics

Date Founded: May 1, 2024
Location: Austin, Texas
No. of employees: 2
Funding to date: $0
Website: https://www.copper-robotics.com/
RoboBusiness Booth: 725

Copper Robotics is developing a robotics framework for creating fast and reliable robots. The company’s founder, Guillaume Binet, said Copper offers a high-level configuration system and a Rust-first API. It uses Rust’s zero-cost abstractions and a data-oriented approach to achieve sub-microsecond latency on commodity hardware, avoiding heap allocation during execution. Guillaume said Copper leverages Rust’s strengths, such as memory safety, concurrency, and zero-cost abstractions, to build an ecosystem around Rust and robotics.

Dexman.ai

Date Founded: April 1, 2023
Location: Seattle
No. of employees: 2
Funding to date: #0
Website: https://www.dexman.ai/
RoboBusiness Booth: 822

This startup is building DEX, an AI operating system (OS) for robotic arms. Company founder and CEO Mihai Jalobeanu said the OS enables integrators (and even end-users) to rapidly develop and deploy robust and reliable vision-based robotic solutions without writing code. DEX enables workforce augmentation with cobots in unstructured environments, high-mix / low-volume manufacturing and many other circumstances where existing methods fail or would be cost-prohibitive.

Unlike classical operating systems, DEX does not require a screen, keyboard and mouse. Rather, users interact with DEX in the same way they would with an apprentice, explaining and showing the steps and strategies to achieve the task, supervising the execution and providing corrections if needed.

Isochronic AG

Date Founded: Sept. 1, 2020
Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
No. of employees: 15
Funding to date: $3.5M
Website: https://isochronic.com/
RoboBusiness Booth: 727

Isochronic is developing new types of pick & place industrial robots, which enable simultaneous parts transport for the first time. In June 2024, the company shipped and installed its first industrial pilot system. It is now engaging with additional customers across Europe & North America.

Paradigm Robotics

Date Founded: May 27, 2022
Location: Austin, Texas
No. of employees: 7
Funding to date: $35,000
Website: https://www.paradigmrobotics.tech/
RoboBusiness Booth: 729

Paradigm Robotics’ flagship product, FireBot, is a high-temperature resistant unmanned ground vehicle built to augment firefighting, public safety, and emergency operations in structure fires, emergencies, disasters, incidents, and hazardous environments. FireBot is outfitted with a modular and advanced suite of sensors that provide life-saving, mission-critical situational awareness in the most hazardous conditions.

FireBot can be deployed into structural fires or other immediately dangerous to life or health (IDLH) environments to support primary and secondary search operations, detect and identify hazards, respond to HazMat & RIC situations, monitor fire dynamics (locate the seat of a fire, extension etc), monitor air quality & structural integrity, 3D map structures, carry equipment and payloads (up to 300lbs), support post-incident auditing, act as a TED device, and act as a support device for fire ground operations.

Robotics 88

Date Founded: February 24, 2021
Location: Boston
No. of employees: 4
Funding to date: $0
Website: https://www.robotics88.com/
RoboBusiness Booth: 824

Robotic 88’s autonomous unmanned aircraft system (UAS) empowers land managers to mitigate wildfire risk and increase ecosystem health by restoring the natural fire regimes of our forest landscapes through the enhanced application of prescribed fire. The core innovation of this UAS is its ability to fly at low altitudes below the tree canopy to map critical vegetation data from the forest floor.

This UAS combines autonomous decision-making algorithms, mapping, obstacle avoidance, and multi-UAS coordination to provide value at every stage of the burn: Pre-burn maps inform ideal weather conditions and resource requirements, and post-burn maps support complete mop-up (ensuring the fire is out) and long-term forest monitoring. Aerial ignition and situational awareness enable larger and safer prescribed burns.

Summer Robotics

Date Founded: January 1, 2020
Location: Campbell, Calif.
No. of employees: 7
Funding to date: $0
Website: https://www.summerrobotics.ai/
RoboBusiness Booth: 723

Summer Robotics has developed a robotic visual intelligence system, which it said gives robots 10x faster reaction times. The company licenses its software to partners that build vision hardware. This hardware, coupled with its software, enables robots to perform tasks that until now have only been able to be performed by humans, e.g. fastening bolts on a moving automotive line, with unpredictable motions.

Summer Robotics said it is currently working with its first partner to bring a product to market in early 2025 in the automotive manufacturing industry.