Oliver Mitchell

Oliver Mitchell is a partner at Arkenstone Venture Partners, a dual-use venture firm investing in defense technology, cybersecurity, automation, and AI-driven enterprise software, born out of Israel’s elite military units. Oliver is also a partner at ff Venture Capital, where he leads investments in robotics, artificial intelligence, drones, industrial automation, and climate tech, and builds strategic alliances with limited partners and corporate venture groups. A seasoned investor, Oliver boasts a proven track record of successful exits, including two IPOs (Novocure and Ekso Bionics), a $1.4 billion private equity sale of TripleLift, and high returns from recent transactions, including the acquisition of Scite.ai by Research Solutions (RSSS) and CardFlight’s growth equity round led by WestView Capital Partners. He currently serves on the boards of CivRobotics, Cambrian Robotics, and Paraspot, leveraging his deep tech expertise to scale transformative companies. Previously, he built and exited ventures such as Holmes Protection, AmeriCash, and RobotGalaxy, a national STEM-focused brand. As an Adjunct Professor at Sy Syms School of Business and the author of A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots and AI, he continues to shape innovation, sharing insights on his blog as the “Robot Rabbi.“

The Five Senses of Robotics

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Healthy humans take for granted their five senses. In order to mold metal into perceiving machines, it requires a significant amount of engineers and capital. Already, we have handed over many of our faculties to embedded devices in our cars, homes, workplaces, hospitals, and governments. Even automation skeptics unwillingly trust the smart gadgets in their … Read more

Disaster Recovery Robots Working Overtime

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Since Labor Day, North America has been hit with an unprecedented wave of natural disasters, from forest fires still raging in California to multiple catastrophic hurricanes in the Atlantic to an earthquake shattering one of the world’s most populated cities. If there is one silver lining from these events, it has been the wide deployment … Read more

RoboBusiness 2017: What’s Cooking In Robotics?

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Mike Toscano, the former president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, emphatically declared at the September RobotLab forum that “anyone who claims to know the future of the [robotics] industry is lying, I mean no one could’ve predicted the computing mobile revolution.” These words acted as a guiding principle when walking around RoboBusiness in … Read more

Descartes Revisited: Do Robots Think?

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This past week, a robotic first happened: ABB’s Yumi robot conducted the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra in Pisa, Italy. The dual-armed robot overshadowed even his vocal collaborator, Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. While many will try to hype the performance as ushering in a new new era of mechanical musicians, Yumi’s artistic career was short-lived as it … Read more