Will 2024 See Autotech Ventures Racing East?

As my colleague Steve Crowe reported last October, one of the biggest automation stories of the year was the stalling of Cruise after California’s Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its driverless testing license. While Cruise has had many mishaps since the launch of its robotaxi service on the streets of San Francisco in June 2022, … Read more

Israeli Robot Startups Prepare for Post-War Valuation Bump

One could hear in the hallways of RoboBusiness murmurings of shock and disgust with the Hamas terrorist attacks still smoldering. Just eleven days prior, a sunny morning in Israel was marred by bloodshed and the death of thousands of innocents. Consequently, the startup nation’s economy quickly spiraled. Almost overnight some of the world’s most promising … Read more

Automate 2023 Recap And The Receding Horizon Problem

“Thirty million developers” are the answer to driving billion-dollar robot startups, exclaimed Eliot Horowitz of Viam last week at Automate. The hushed crowd of about 200 hardware entrepreneurs listened intensely to MongoDB‘s founder and former CTO (a $20Bn success story). Now, Horowitz aims to take the same approach that he took to democratizing cloud data … Read more

Gen-Z Roboticists In The Age of ChatGPT

This past Wednesday I had the good fortune to host my firm’s sixty-fourth Idea Dinner on the challenges and opportunities facing the automation industry. Part of ff Venture Capital‘s mission is partnering with corporates to bolster our portfolio’s reach and contribute to the broader innovation ecosystem. In this spirit, I brought together fifteen leaders from … Read more