Robotics Founders to Watch, November 2026

The best-known robotics leaders get most of the coverage. The people on this list run smaller companies in surgery, labs, factories, and inspection, and each had a concrete October. Mark Toland closed a $125 million Series D at MMI, Matthieu Masselin bought Ekso Bionics for Wandercraft, and Jake Loosararian saw Gecko Robotics' Navy contract ceiling quadruple to $300 million.^32,22,20

Each person is here because their company did something between September 28 and November 2, 2026, not as a career ranking. For the companies themselves, see Hottest Robotics Companies, and for the money behind them, Hottest Robotics Investors. All of our profiles are in People in robotics.

How we chose

We tracked rounds, acquisitions, product deliveries, contracts, and quarterly results announced from September 28 to November 2, 2026 by robotics companies we review, and chose the founder or, where the founder has handed over, the current CEO. Two entries, James Atwood and Mark Toland, are chief executives who did not found their companies. We favored rising names over household ones and list the ten alphabetically by last name. Each has a profile on Robotics Reviewed.

The list

Robotics Founders to Watch, November 2026
#	Name	Company	Why now
1	John R. Adler Jr.	ZAP Surgical	$36 million led by Catalio on October 19
2	James Atwood	Opentrons	$40 million Series E led by Avego on October 29
3	Péter Fankhauser	ANYbotics	ANYmal X deliveries began October 27
4	Saman Farid	Formic	$50 million Series B and debt on October 22
5	William Santana Li	Knightscope	Third quarter revenue up 177%, reported October 20
6	Jake Loosararian	Gecko Robotics	Navy contract ceiling raised to $300 million on October 20
7	Matthieu Masselin	Wandercraft	Bought Ekso Bionics on October 1
8	Fred Parietti	Multiply Labs	$75 million Series B on October 6
9	Samuel Reeves	FORT Robotics	About $20 million on October 22, ahead of a Nasdaq listing
10	Mark Toland	MMI	$125 million Series D on October 8

Source: company announcements, SEC filings, and trade press, September 28 to November 2, 2026.^{4,7,9,13,16,20,22,26,29,32}

Year each company was founded and its October 2026 milestone

Company founded
Current CEO took over (non-founders)
Milestone in October 2026

Founding years come from each company's own site or our reviews. James Atwood and Mark Toland are chief executives, not founders.

Source: company sites and announcements. Chart: Robotics Reviewed.^{21,18,15,2,6,30,8,24,28,12}

Key Findings

The companies on this list were founded between 2012 and 2020, so October's milestones came 6 to 14 years in. Masselin's Wandercraft took the longest, and Farid's Formic the shortest.^21,12
Six of the ten leaders raised money in the window, from about $20 million at FORT to $125 million at MMI. The other four had an acquisition, a delivery start, a contract, and a record quarter.^{29,32,22,9,20,16}
Two of the ten are hired chief executives: Toland at MMI since 2021 and Atwood at Opentrons since 2025.^30,6

1.John R. Adler Jr.

Founder and CEO, ZAP Surgical

$36MRaised by ZAP Surgical, led by Catalio⁴

Company: ZAP Surgical, San Carlos, California
Why now: ZAP announced $36 million on October 19, 2026.⁴

Adler, a Stanford neurosurgeon since 1987, invented the CyberKnife, a robotic system that aims radiation at tumors, and founded Accuray to sell it, serving as its CEO from 1999 to 2002. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2025.^2,3

He founded ZAP in 2014 to build a brain radiosurgery system that needs no concrete vault. ZAP-X was FDA cleared in 2017.²

Why now

The round was led by Catalio Capital Management, and ZAP has now shipped 50 systems and treated nearly 10,000 patients. Adler said reaching tens of millions of patients will take strong, mission-aligned partners.⁴

ZAP is still small next to the radiosurgery systems he helped create, and it does not publish revenue.

2.James Atwood

CEO, Opentrons

$40MOpentrons Series E, led by Avego⁷

Company: Opentrons, Long Island City, New York
Why now: Opentrons raised a $40 million Series E on October 29, 2026.⁷

Atwood holds a PhD and spent his career in life science tools, including as general manager of applied genomics at PerkinElmer.⁵ He joined Opentrons in April 2023 to run its robotics business, which grew past 10,000 installed systems, and became CEO in July 2025.⁶

Why now

Avego led the round. Atwood's pitch is that labs using AI to design experiments need low-cost robots that AI can run directly, and Opentrons has more than 11,000 robots in over 80 countries.⁷

He is not a founder, and the round's valuation was not published, so it is hard to say how investors priced that pitch.

3.Péter Fankhauser

Co-founder and CEO, ANYbotics

10+Patents behind ANYmal X, per Fankhauser⁹

Company: ANYbotics, Zurich, Switzerland
Why now: ANYbotics began delivering ANYmal X on October 27, 2026.⁹

Fankhauser developed perception and motion planning for legged robots during his doctorate at ETH Zurich, and co-founded ANYbotics there in 2016.^8,10 The company has raised more than $150 million.⁹

Why now

ANYmal X is built for explosive atmospheres in oil, gas, and chemical plants. Fankhauser said four years of engineering and more than ten patents went into it, and that many experts thought a legged robot could never be made safe for those zones.⁹

Deliveries have just started. Field results from hazardous zones will show whether the engineering pays off.

4.Saman Farid

Founder and CEO, Formic

$50MSeries B and debt for Formic¹³

Company: Formic, Chicago, Illinois
Why now: Formic raised $50 million on October 22, 2026.¹³

Before Formic, Farid ran the global investment fund at Baidu Ventures and founded Comet Labs, and earlier built and sold two technology companies.¹¹ He founded Formic in Chicago in September 2020 after seeing how hard automation was for factories to adopt.¹²

Why now

The round, a Series B led by Mercato Partners plus debt, funds Formic's move from task-specific cells into general-purpose robots that factories rent by the month. It runs hundreds of robots in more than 100 facilities.^13,14

Formic has not said how much of the $50 million is debt.¹⁴

5.William Santana Li

Chairman and CEO, Knightscope

177%Knightscope's year-over-year revenue growth in the third quarter¹⁶

Company: Knightscope, Sunnyvale, California
Why now: Reported about $8.7 million in third quarter revenue on October 20, 2026.¹⁶

Li has led Knightscope since April 2013. Before that he spent nine years at Ford Motor Company and founded Carbon Motors, which developed a purpose-built police car.¹⁵

Why now

Knightscope now sells robots, software, and licensed security agents as one service, and the quarter was its third in a row of triple-digit growth. Li called it the quarter when that service moved from strategy to debut.¹⁶

The results are preliminary, and the company's annual report raises substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.¹⁷

6.Jake Loosararian

Co-founder and CEO, Gecko Robotics

$300MNew ceiling on Gecko's Navy and GSA contract²⁰

Company: Gecko Robotics, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Why now: The contract ceiling was raised on October 20, 2026.²⁰

As a student at Grove City College in 2012, Loosararian built a wall-climbing robot in his dorm room to find defects in a power plant boiler. He co-founded Gecko with his roommate Troy Demmer, and a 2025 round valued it at $1.25 billion.^18,19

Why now

The new ceiling quadruples Gecko's initial $71 million award six months in. Loosararian said the conversation around AI and robotics in defense is no longer about experimental technology.²⁰

A ceiling caps what the Navy can order, and the savings Gecko cites per ship are its own figures.

7.Matthieu Masselin

CEO and co-founder, Wandercraft

700+Rehabilitation centers with the combined company's devices²³

Company: Wandercraft, Paris, France
Why now: Wandercraft announced its purchase of Ekso Bionics on October 1, 2026.²²

Masselin started Wandercraft in Paris in 2012 with Nicolas Simon and Jean-Louis Constanza. Its Atalante exoskeleton became the first self-balancing walking exoskeleton to earn a CE mark in Europe in 2019.²¹

Why now

The deal puts four exoskeletons under one owner. Masselin told IZON the combined company can build up to 2,000 units a year in Paris, and that the scale also helps Calvin-40, its humanoid robot for industrial work.^22,23

Merging two device makers takes time, and the capacity and site figures come from Masselin, not audited results.

8.Fred Parietti

Co-founder and CEO, Multiply Labs

$75MMultiply Labs Series B, led by NantWorks²⁶

Company: Multiply Labs, San Francisco, California
Why now: Multiply Labs raised a $75 million Series B on October 6, 2026.²⁶

Parietti earned a PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT in 2016, working on wearable robot arms, and started Multiply Labs that year with Alice Melocchi and two others.²⁴ The company moved from printing supplement capsules to automating cell therapy production, which is still mostly done by hand in cleanrooms.²⁵

Why now

“Robotics is the only way to deliver these therapies to patients at scale,” Parietti said with the round, which NantWorks led and which took the total raised above $100 million.²⁶

Commercial-scale production for drug makers is the test still ahead.

9.Samuel Reeves

Founder and CEO, FORT Robotics

19,500+FORT units in use at over 600 customers²⁹

Company: FORT Robotics, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Why now: FORT announced about $20 million in new commitments on October 22, 2026.²⁹

Reeves co-founded Humanistic Robotics as a Wharton student to build cheaper landmine-clearing machines, then remote-control kits that turned ordinary vehicles into robots.²⁷ He founded FORT in 2018 to give robots the safety and security systems that work showed they lacked.²⁸

Why now

The money, led by Tiger Global, comes ahead of FORT's planned Nasdaq listing through a SPAC merger. Reeves said the opportunity for FORT has never been greater.²⁹

About half of the money depends on the merger closing, which FORT expects in the fourth quarter of 2026 or the first quarter of 2027.²⁹

10.Mark Toland

CEO, MMI

$125MMMI Series D, led by BioStar Capital³²

Company: MMI (Medical Microinstruments), Jacksonville, Florida
Why now: MMI raised a $125 million Series D on October 8, 2026.³²

Toland led the US commercial team for Boston Scientific's cardiovascular businesses and then ran Corindus Vascular Robotics, which Siemens Healthineers bought for $1.1 billion in 2019. He joined BioStar Capital as a partner in 2020 and became MMI's CEO in January 2021.^30,31

Why now

“Now, our focus is translating that adoption into scale,” Toland said with the round. MMI has about 50 Symani systems installed and 3,500 procedures done.³²

He is not a founder, and the investor that led this round is the firm he worked at before MMI, which is worth knowing when reading the vote of confidence.^31,32

What to watch next month

Reeves expects FORT's SPAC merger to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 or the first quarter of 2027.²⁹ Li will report audited third quarter numbers for Knightscope.¹⁶ Masselin will start combining Wandercraft and Ekso Bionics, and the first joint product or sales figures will show how the deal is going.²³

The Robotics Founders to Watch list is updated monthly. See every edition of our rankings, including past months as they are added.

Sources

Methodology

We included founders or current chief executives of robotics companies that announced a funding round, acquisition, contract, product delivery, or quarterly result from September 28 to November 2, 2026, and checked each event against a company announcement, an SEC filing, or trade press. Quotes come from company announcements and published interviews. Founding years come from company sites and our reviews. The ten people are listed alphabetically by last name, not ranked.