Former Tesla Optimus Lead is Launching an Industrial Robot Startup

Kevin McLaughlin reports, citing two people with direct knowledge, that Ashish Kumar, a former AI lead for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, has co-founded Intelligent Machines, a San Francisco startup building non-humanoid robots for tasks normally done by highly skilled workers in industries such as manufacturing and aerospace. It has hired several former Optimus team members and is raising a seed round that could end up around $100M, according to one person. It is focused on software for now, though its leaders have discussed designing hardware, and it uses reinforcement learning (Kumar’s UC Berkeley PhD focus) to teach robots complex tasks. It isn’t clear whether it relies on vision-language-action models, but its approach differs from world-model startups such as General Intuition and World Labs. Kumar spent more than two years at Tesla, including a year as Optimus AI lead, left a year ago and then spent four months at Meta. Former Optimus colleague Kamal Gupta also left Tesla over the summer. The piece notes Tesla’s Optimus hand-engineering delays and Vinod Khosla’s prediction that more than half of robotics startups will see valuations drop by 2030.