Chris Walti knows a thing or two about robots.
Walti spent more than seven years at Tesla, where he ultimately led the project that became the much-discussed humanoid robot Optimus. Since 2022, he’s been CEO and cofounder of warehouse robotics startup Mytra, whose backers include Greenoaks and Eclipse Ventures. There’s never been a better time to build serious hardware at the startup level, Walti says—and it’s all because coveted talent is increasingly willing to take a chance. In the 2000s, in the early days of Tesla and later Rivian, a gifted roboticist might have seemed crazy to leave a cozy corporate job for a startup. To boot, there was also a finite number of roboticists out there. But that's all slowly changing.
"There's this wedge of great folks who have proven track records," Walti told Fortune. "Ten or 15 years ago, it would have been really hard to find those people, who have the experience in scale, sophistication, innovation, and speed. Now there’s a critical mass—not many, but a critical mass—of folks who can help energize Mytra, our few dozen peers, and the next 500,000 companies solving all the different problems in the physical world."
Mytra recently brought in three key (and illustrative) hires, Fortune can exclusively report. Tesla veteran Laurel Fullerton is joining the company as director of electrical engineering, while Matthew Clark left Rivian to be Mytra’s director of structural engineering. Mike Brevoort, who has led product and development teams at Slack and Lockheed Martin, will be Mytra’s new principal engineer for AI. This kind of technical talent is historically rare, says Walti.
"One of the hardest things about building any deep tech-hardware-software robotics company is that you need these varied disciplines," he said. "Very rarely do people come right out of college with the wisdom and expertise…They’re also really hard to recruit because they’re 10 to 15 years in their careers, and they probably have small children. They’re not interested in taking a massive salary cut to be a fly on the wall."
But for some time, the winds have been shifting. Walti told Fortune that the rise of companies like Tesla, Lucid Motors, Rivian, and SpaceX created situations where more people than ever were put into "positions of innovation…[and] developed hardware at speed and scale." "The compounding effect of success" for these hardware-centric startups has given other deep tech founders (and employees) a playbook, said Walti.
"There’s a path to success now," he said. "There’s a large TAM, and a blueprint for disrupting these entrenched legacy industries that investors believe in, employees believe in, and founders ourselves, that we can believe in."
Mytra has raised a total of $78 million in funding so far to build warehouse robots that specialize in material flow—a ubiquitous process across supply chains that involves moving and storing raw materials, objects, parts, and more. Mytra’s currently building a robot that can lift 3,000 pounds.
And, yes, there’s an AI-sized elephant in the room right now, and no shortage of talk about how AI is ushering in a new era for robotics. It's a double-edged sword. Walti said that the AI boom has created a lot of hiring "noise," with Mytra receiving 100x more applicants for AI positions compared to other roles. But there are positives—Walti says people are more attuned to software’s potential to affect our physical world. For Mytra, that creates opportunities with great timing.
"We would not be able to build the company that we’re building, with the speed we’re going at, if we didn’t have these kinds of people available to us," said Walti. "I wouldn’t have chosen to start this company ten or 15 years ago."
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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