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.
