What if the robots are already there — but nobody can get them to actually work, inexpensively and at scale?

In this episode, Ashish Kapoor, founder of General Robotics and former head of the Microsoft Research robotics initiative, discuss how General Robotics is powering the usefulness of robots, immediately and at scale. Ashish has spent his career at the intersection of frontier AI and real-world deployment — and what he found when he surveyed the enterprise robotics landscape was startling: out of 150 large enterprises he spoke with, each having spent north of $100 million on robotic equipment, zero were in production deployment.

The problem isn't the hardware. It's the intelligence layer. General Robotics is building what General Robotics calls the Intelligence Grid — an AI platform that plugs into existing robots across 40+ OEMs, giving them the ability to adapt to unstructured environments, manipulate objects, and navigate dynamic spaces.  A power grid, but for robot intelligence.

Ashish walks through his unusual journey, dreaming of being and Indian Air Force pilot, arriving at MIT a quarter century ago where machine learning was everywhere, to flying his own kit airplane, to 18 years at Microsoft Research learning how to take frontier science to commercial scale. 

He founded General Robotics in 2023 and now has a 25-person team — 19 of them world-class roboticists — and has already signed approximately 10 large enterprise customers across manufacturing, defense, and logistics, with a target of 100 in the next 12 to 18 months.

”Access to capital is easy. Access to folks  (E14) who can really help you is very hard. Optimize for the second, and the capital will come automatically.” 

”Curiosity, integrity, drive. If I find someone who excels in all three, I would hire them right away. Skills can be taught — but those three things are harder to find.”

Key themes in this episode:

–       The Intelligence Grid: why robots need an AI power grid, not just better brains

–       The deployment gap: $100M+ in idle robots and why zero enterprises are in production

–       Research to reality: bridging frontier science and operational deployment

–       Hiring for character: curiosity, integrity, and drive over pure technical skill

–       Smart capital: VCs as partners — access to customers and talent matters more than money 

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