Standard Bots: The robotics startup betting on an American manufacturing comeback

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead.

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email:

• 💡 This startup is building AI-native industrial robot arms that you can program just by showing them what to do, so factory operators can deploy automation in hours instead of months.
  

• 📈 They’ve just hit nearly 10x annual revenue growth, with robot orders up 20x in the last year, making them the largest U.S. industrial robotics company by robots shipped.
  

• 🚀 They raised a $63M Series B in July 2024, led by General Catalyst with backing from Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Samsung Next, Lachy Groom & more.

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Standard Bots 📈

Standard Bots was founded by Evan Beard and David Golden in 2011.

It is an American robotics company based in New York City, with a clear vision to build the world’s preeminent robotics platform.

Their mission is to use AI to create the most accessible robots in the world, starting with manufacturers, and use those robots to unlock a more resilient American industrial base.

At the product level, Standard Bots builds vertically integrated, AI-native robot arms.

You move the arm through a task, the system records video and position data, and Flux AI™ Skill by demonstration learns the exact routine.

There is no line of robot code to write. It’s more like teaching a new operator than programming a machine.

Those skills live inside ArcOS, their AI-powered operating system.

Routines are laid out like a story, with steps, conditions, and branches, plus APIs and SDKs for teams that want to go deeper.

They design their own joints using AmpereDrive™ technology, with in-house motors, encoders, and drives to maximize torque density and force sensing.

The robots run on NVIDIA Isaac “physical AI” so they can adapt to messy, real-world environments instead of brittle, pre-programmed paths.

On top of that, they ship a full product line:

• Core (RO1) for most manufacturing tasks, 18 kg payload, 1.3 m reach.

• Thor for heavy-duty work, 30 kg payload, 2.0 m reach, IP69K.

• Spark for tabletop and education, 7 kg payload.

• Bolt for custom configurations.

Their value prop is simple for a factory owner.

Plug in a robot that feels like hiring a fast learner, at a price and deployment speed that beats foreign hardware plus expensive integrators.

Robotics Thesis 🦾

Their core insight on GTM is that robotics fails in most factories because of three things: Programming complexity, integration delays, and unclear ROI.

With Standard Bots, operators can teach the robot by demonstration, with modes like Tele-op (gamepad), Antigravity (weightless teaching), and Classic jog for precise moves.

You do not need a robotics engineer on staff operating it.

ArcOS beats integration complexity.

Routines are visual and chronological, like editing a video timeline, and you can add Waypoints, conditional “Stop Early If” steps, and full 3D visualization inside the software.

On the deployment side, they turned setup into a product.

You fill in a form, then go through three steps.

1. Brief intro call.

2. Customized automation plan.

3. Then a free 30-day onsite pilot, with the robot delivered in 4 weeks. 

For a small shop, that is a very different experience from a traditional integrator project that drags on for months and requires a large upfront check.

The price is part of their advantage too.

A typical Universal Robots arm plus Robotiq accessories and integrator time often ends up around $60k-$80k.

A Standard Bots Core lists at $37,000, with higher specs in payload, reach, and torque sensing.

They are making an explicit price-to-capability argument.

The customer base reflects that story.

Standard Bots robots run in facilities for companies like NASA, Lockheed Martin, Verizon, and other large manufacturers, while still targeting independent shops that never had access to this kind of automation.

Backstory 👀

Evan Beard grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, then studied CS and graduated with distinction in Economics from Duke University in 2009.

While still in school, he wrote an iOS app called “Girlfriend Keeper” - it asked for details about your girlfriend and sent automated emails & text messages expressing affection. The app got global press, getting featured on Good Morning America & The LA Times.

Right out of college, he co-founded Etacts, a relationship management app that went through Y Combinator, raised $700k from angels like Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher, and was acquired by Salesforce in 2010.

Evan then joined Salesforce as a Senior Member of Technical Staff, seeing how large-scale enterprise software is built and shipped.

He was not done.

In 2011, he co-founded Gridtech / ArmorHub, scanning websites for security vulnerabilities, which was later acquired by Spirent Communications.

In 2013, he co-founded A Plus with Ashton Kutcher and Kendall Dabaghi, building a positive-news media company for millennials. It grew to 50 million unique visitors/month and $5M in revenue run-rate before being acquired by Chicken Soup for the Soul.

By 2016, he was on Forbes 30 Under 30 and on Business Insider’s list of the most influential people in New York tech.

So you have a pattern. Multiple exits, deep enterprise exposure, consumer distribution instincts, and a bias toward building.

David Golden brings a different but complementary arc.

He started as an Investment Banking Analyst at UBS, then worked as an Investment Professional at Freshford Capital from 2010-2013, learning how capital really moves.

He then switched to operating.

David co-founded LeapPay, built real-time data capture tools for small business loan underwriting, and sold it to Funding Circle in 2014.

He then co-founded Bowery Farming in 2015, using proprietary software (BoweryOS) and hardware to build what became the largest vertical farming company in the U.S. They raised $473M from Fidelity, GV, General Catalyst & more.

The spark for Standard Bots came from a simple, harsh observation: U.S. factories had almost no American-made industrial robots.

The Hustle 🤑

Most robots on the floor were foreign, expensive, and hard to program.

So in a small New York apartment, Evan and a friend started building robots.

• Segway robots.

• Mobile bases.

• Plastic and carbon fiber arms.

• Grippers.

This was the “garage phase” jammed into a city apartment. At some point the pattern clicked.

If they could build high-quality, American robots that were easier to use and cheaper to deploy, they could hit three problems at once.

1. National security, by reducing dependence on foreign hardware.

2. The environment, by shortening supply chains and enabling local production.

3. Jobs, by making it viable to bring manufacturing back and still stay cost-competitive.

Then reality hit. They raised seed funding around COVID-19 and soon almost ran out of money.

Evan moved his own savings into the company account to keep the doors open while they were debugging electronics.

There was a period where FETs were literally exploding, shooting metal fragments out of the boards, and the team had to debug hardware remotely during a pandemic.

Most software founders never touch that level of physical risk. Standard Bots did, and kept going.

To fix quality and cost, they decided to vertically integrate.

Everything was designed and built in-house, then automated so the U.S. facility could compete with global factories where suppliers were quoted 10x cheaper than domestic ones.

Vertical integration raises execution risk and complexity, but it also creates a moat.

You control cost, performance, and supply chain. That is the bet they chose.

Stats 📊

Today, revenue is growing ~10x annually, robot orders are up 20x yoy, and team size has doubled over the last 12 months. The startup has become the largest U.S. industrial robotics company by robots shipped.

The Core (RO1) arm comes in at $37,000 list price, with 18 kg payload, 1.3 m reach, 6 DOF, 435°/s max joint speed, ±0.025 mm repeatability.

Orders deliver in about 4 weeks, and customers can start with the 30-day pilot instead of a full multi-year commitment.

Standard Bots operates from a 16,000 sq. ft. facility in Glen Cove, New York, designing and assembling robots in the U.S. to compete with a global market where 70% of industrial robot installations come from Japan, China, Germany, and South Korea.

In a world where global manufacturers expect 18-36 month ROI on robotic production lines, their robots gives an average payback time of under 6 months...

Standard Bots raised a $63M Series B in July 2024, led by General Catalyst, with participation from Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Samsung Next, plus investors like Lachy Groom, Quiet Capital, Box Group, and Zeno Partners.

According to Arfur Rock, they now have a $12M revenue run-rate, 10x fortune 500 customers and are in the middle of raising their Series C.

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