Hey, it's Greg

This week's conversation is with an investor who spends his days deciding which robotics companies are actually businesses. What separates the two turned out to have less to do with the technology than I expected.

What's on your mind this week? Hit reply and let me know. I read every response.

In this week's edition:

This week I sat down with Scott Walbrun, Principal at BMW i Ventures.

Scott started out inside the automotive industry, moved through investment banking, and now invests at the intersection of physical AI, robotics, manufacturing, industrial software, and advanced materials. That path shows up in how he evaluates companies.

His core argument: commercial validation matters as much as technical validation. A lot of breakthrough technology never leaves the lab, and the reason usually isn't the engineering. It's whether the team built real commercial urgency around it.

Some of what we covered:

What BMW i Ventures looks for in Series A and B companies across robotics, industrial software, and advanced materials
The hidden costs of deploying robotics at scale: maintenance, field service, reliability, and total cost of ownership
What investors actually mean when they ask about repeatability, and why one successful pilot is rarely enough
Why founders should personally own customer development before building a sales team
The biggest mistake founders make when they try to scale too quickly

If you're building in robotics, or raising for anything capital-intensive, this one's worth your time.

A few active searches that might be relevant to you or someone in your network:

Founding Head of Engineering | San Francisco
Stealth B2B robotics and AI company automating industrial operations across manufacturing, logistics, and retail. Founding-team role with full product ownership, taking an alpha prototype in a live customer warehouse through to validated hardware and software. Founded by Tesla, Nike, Amazon, and Zipline alumni.

Lead Robotics AI Engineer | San Francisco
Climate-impact robotics startup building autonomous robots that construct renewable energy infrastructure. Technical lead across perception, planning, and control: manipulation and navigation AI, simulation-driven training pipelines, and vision, LIDAR, and tactile sensing. Founded by Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford researchers.

Principal Architect & Technical Program Lead | Pennsylvania
Robotics firm building custom systems for heavy industry. Systems engineering paired with program leadership: running multidisciplinary hardware and software teams, supporting strategic proposals, and carrying complex builds from concept through enterprise delivery.

Know someone? Reply to this email and send them our way.

Blackstone Takes a $676M Bet on the Parts Inside Robots (Blackstone)
A major investment in Futronic, a South Korean maker of high-precision actuators for automotive and industrial robotics. Capital is moving deeper into the robotics supply chain, where the components may matter as much as the software.

Agility Robotics to Go Public Through $2.5 Billion SPAC Merger (Robotics & Automation News)
The first pure-play humanoid company heading to a public exchange. Over $300M in booked multi-year revenue with Amazon, Toyota, GXO, and Schaeffler already on the customer list.

Lockheed Martin Taps Machina's Robots for Mission-Critical Missile Parts (The Robot Report)
Machina Labs just landed a qualification contract for the JASSM missile program. Their AI-powered "RoboForming" cells compress metal structure production from months to days. Defense manufacturing is getting a robotics upgrade.

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