Start-up Society #105: Cal vs Stanford | 💙🐻💛 vs ❤️🌲🤍 (Part 2)

Keeping the American Dream Alive

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Start-up Society

8 min readNov 11, 2022

Welcome to the 105th edition of Start-up Society! This blog highlights some of the most exciting start-ups in the country striving to keep the American Dream alive.

Make sure you check out the previous issue, if you have not already, here!

Following up on last week’s article, we are continuing with the second part of our Cal vs Stanford rivalry series in honor of the upcoming Big Game on November 19, 2022!

Each article in this series highlights one start-up founded by a UC Berkeley alum and one start-up founded by a Stanford alum. We had some awesome engagement on last week’s LinkedIn post. Let’s see who wins this week’s matchup!

Home Team: California Golden Bears (The University of California, Berkeley)

Ambi Robotics

HQ: Berkeley, California

Founded: 2018

Employees: 56 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Ambi Robotics is an artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company developing advanced solutions that scale e-commerce operations to meet demand while empowering humans to work smarter.
The company’s industry-leading AI operating system, AmbiOS, leverages advanced simulation-to-reality (Sim2Real) technology to operate highly-dexterous robotic systems.

On October 17, 2022, the company announced it raised $32 million in additional funding. Existing investors Tiger Global and Bow Capital are joined by Ahren and the company’s strategic partner, Pitney Bowes. The funding will fuel the deployment growth of AI-powered parcel sorting systems as customer demand increases ahead of peak holiday season and throughout 2023.
Previously in March 2022, the company struck a $23 million deployment expansion deal with global shipping and mailing company Pitney Bowes (NYSE: PBI). With its AmbiSort systems, Ambi Robotics helps Pitney Bowes speed parcel sortation to last-mile delivery providers, while improving productivity, accuracy, and worker safety. Pitney Bowes is making the investment in Robot as a Service (RaaS) fees over the next four years.
AmbiSort is a high-speed, AI-powered robotic sorting system that can handle millions of unique parcels on day one. It can sort boxes, polybags, and envelopes from bulk input flow (chutes, totes, and bins) into destination containers (mail sacks, totes) over 50% faster than manual labor.
Ambi has another product, AmbiKit, which is a configurable, AI-powered multi-robot kitting system that rapidly builds unique kits from any item set. Optimal for things such as subscription boxes and medical kits.

MEET THE TEAM

Jim Liefer, CEO

Jim was appointed as CEO of the company on March 31, 2021
Previously he was CEO of Kindred AI, where he transformed the company from an AI research lab to a customer-facing organization that develops and deploys business solutions for global retail customers. In 2020, the company was acquired by Ocado Group for $262 million.
Jim is a Fresno State alum — Go Bulldogs!

Jeff Mahler, Co-Founder & CTO

Jeff was the CEO of Ambi Robotics from its founding until Jim’s joining in 2021
Jeff is the creator of the Dex-Net project at UC Berkeley, which developed leading-edge AI algorithms and software for rapidly teaching robots to pick and place a variety of items.
Previously, Jeff cofounded Lynx Laboratories, a 3D scanning company acquired by Occipital in 2015.
Jeff earned his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) from UC Berkeley in 2018.
He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013.

Matthew Matl, Co-Founder & VP of Software Engineering

Previously, Matthew was a Ph.D. student and robotics researcher at UC Berkeley.
Matthew earned his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) from UC Berkeley in 2018. He was a Ph.D. candidate but left early to co-found Ambi.
He received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2016.

Stephen McKinley, Co-Founder & VP of Operations

Previously, Stephen was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UC Berkeley where he worked with the esteemed Pieter Abbeel (remember him from last week?)
Stephen earned his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2016. He also earned his M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2014.
Stephen received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011.

David Gealy, Co-Founder & VP of Hardware

Previously David was a robotics researcher at UC Berkeley focusing on mechatronic design and control, working with Professor Pieter Abbeel in the Robot Learning Lab (RLL) and with Ken Goldberg in AUTOLAB.
David earned both his M.S. and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Ken Goldberg, Chief Scientist

Ken is currently a highly esteemed Professor at UC Berkeley, where he is the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering.
He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and his bachelor’s from the University of Pennsylvania.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Ambi believes in a world where robots exist to amplify the human experience, however, there are legitimate concerns this could replace warehouse jobs. As Brad Stone in Bloomberg writes, “[Ambisort] doesn’t need coffee in the mornings, bathroom breaks or relentless corporate agitprop about why it shouldn’t join a labor union…The Ambisort can plow through about 400 parcels per hour; humans do the same work at about one-third the pace and usually make more mistakes.”
While this looks like a ploy to eliminate jobs and cut down costs, the reality is logistics companies are dealing with unprecedented demand from the explosive growth in e-commerce activity. E-commerce accounts for about 14% of retail sales today in the U.S. and is projected to grow much larger in the decades ahead (source). As we discussed in last week’s article, the tight labor market makes it unrealistic for companies to meet this demand solely by hiring people. Even with warehouse automation, there is still a need for human roles. Instead of handling parcels, we will be handling robots. In fact, AI robots will help increase warehouse worker safety, accuracy, and productivity.

GO DEEPER

Ambi Robotics secures $32M infusion to deploy its item-sorting robots in warehouses

Ambi Robotics Raises Funding for New Kind of Warehouse Robot

Pitney Bowes and Ambi Robotics Sign $23 Million Deployment Expansion To Help Optimize Last-Mile Sorting Across US Hubs

Ambi Robotics closes $26M Series A to begin growth

Away Team: The Stanford Cardinal (Stanford University)

Dexterity

HQ: Redwood City, California

Founded: 2017

Employees: 211 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Dexterity creates intelligent robotic solutions for logistics, warehouses, and supply chain customers. The company’s robotic software-as-a-service (SaaS) products equip robots with the vision, touch, and human-like skill and speed to handle unstructured piles of goods with elegance and dexterity.
Dexterity solves labor shortages by delegating repetitive tasks — such as sortation, palletizing, and fulfillment — so employees can focus on higher-level, cognitive work. The company’s full-stack robotics systems are in production 24/7 with a support and performance guarantee.

Dexterity’s solutions excel at handling the hardest-to-grasp items in any warehouse without requiring expensive and bulky auxiliary infrastructure. As an industry first, Dexterity’s robotic systems have handled 50,000+ SKUs ranging from loosely packed deformable polybags, to delicate hot-dog buns, to floppy tortillas, to poorly sealed cardboard boxes, to bags of earthworms, to trays and crates of consumer food, to even a molten birthday cake.
On October 13, 2021, the company announced a $140 million equity funding and debt Series B, led by existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins. Obvious Ventures, B37 Ventures, and Presidio Ventures also participated. The round brings the company’s total funding north of $200 million and sets its valuation at $1.4 billion.

MEET THE TEAM

Samir Menon, Founder & CEO

Samir received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2017.
He completed his bachelor’s at the Indian Institute of Information Technology.

Robert Sun, Founding Engineer

Robert earned his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2017.

Kevin Chavez, Founding Engineer

Kevin earned both his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Ben Varkey Benjamin, Founding Engineer

Ben earned both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Stanford University in 2010 and 2018 respectively.
He completed his bachelor’s at Mahatma Gandhi University.

Talbot Morris-Downing, Founding Engineer

Talbot graduated from Stanford University where he studied Computer Science.

Roger Hau, Founding Product Manager

Previously, Roger was a Senior Product Manager at Tableau.
He earned his B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014.

Adam Kell, Founding Product Manager

Previously, Adam was a Program Manager at Google. He was also a Founder and Partner at Comet Labs, a seed-stage VC firm focused on robotics companies.
Adam studied Product Design and Mechanical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Materials Science Engineering at Stanford University.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Dexterity’s intelligent robots constantly adapt to warehouse operations and perform tedious and strenuous tasks, which maximizes productivity by enabling humans to focus on meaningful work.
The warehousing industry urgently needs automation to do the tedious, laborious, and unsafe tasks that make it difficult to recruit and retain staff. While supply chains continue to expand at a rapid pace driven by growth in e-commerce, interest in jobs that are repetitive and even dangerous continues to decline. This trend accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased volume, an exacerbated labor shortage, and the inability to guarantee safety for workers without heavily disrupting operations has amplified the need for automation.