Beyond its early pioneers, Boston’s robotics scene now includes hundreds of companies. Wilmington-based Symbotic, supplying warehouse robots to Walmart, went public in June and has a stock market value approaching $10 billion. Dotted in a ring around Route 128, other emerging players include 6 River Systems, Vicarious Surgical, and Vecna Robotics.
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Like Kiva, iRobot, and Boston Dynamics, many of the region’s companies and founders have MIT ties, but it would be a mistake to credit any one university for the robotics boom. The region is home to 36 academic labs focused on the field, ranging from Harvard’s Agile Robotics Lab to UMass Lowell’s New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation, or NERVE, Center and Tufts’ Human Robot Interaction Lab.
Massachusetts robotics success wasn’t guaranteed, however. About a decade ago, California was luring more startups. So in 2015, the Baker administration joined with tech industry trade group MassTLC to create
MassRobotics, a nonprofit now based in the Seaport, that provides early support and office space for robotics entrepreneurs.
Those entrepreneurs include the founders of American Robotics, who came to Boston from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh as MassRobotics’ first startup-in-residence. It was a coup for Boston given that Carnegie Mellon had spun off numerous startups in its hometown, particularly for autonomous vehicles. Now American Robotics is based in Waltham and last year became the first company to win Federal Aviation Administration approval to make fully automated commercial drone flights.
So far, MassRobotics’ Seaport facility has hosted 108 companies that have gone on to raise more than $350 million from venture capital firms, the nonprofit said in a March report.
“All this technology was being developed here,” said Tom Ryden, the executive director of MassRobotics who once worked at iRobot. “But a few years ago, there was the sense that founders left and went out to Silicon Valley to develop it.”
The final stimulus for growth of the ecosystem is people who get trained at an established company moving on to start their own companies. The phenomenon is known as the “spillover effect,” explained Fady Saad, who helped create MassRobotics and now runs a robotics-focused VC firm called Cybernetix Ventures.