Jack Pearson is an Investment Principal at RoboStrategy. He supports the investment process end-to-end across sourcing, diligence, portfolio support, and thesis development. Previously, Jack spent a decade as a founder and operator in robotics, holding commercial and product leadership roles, founding EngX, a venture-backed robotics company built and scaled from Shenzhen, and running Remix Robotics, a bespoke automation and robotics agency. He writes and delivers keynotes on robotics and is a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellow.
Most robotics companies don't fail because the robot doesn't work. They fail because the economics never did, or because the company ran out of cash before the economics had a chance to. Both are avoidable, and both are predictable, if you know what to look at. This session offers a set of mental models for judging whether a robotics business can create real value and capture it in a way that lasts. We start with whether the robot is worth building at all. Most people get this wrong on both sides. They undercount the value, thinking only about labor saved while ignoring many important factors, and they underestimate the true cost. We will work through how to understand these relationships, and what raises or lowers the bar a business has to clear for success. Then we follow the cash. How money moves through a robotics business is the clearest picture you will get of how value moves through it. Trace the cash and you can see where value is genuinely created, where it is captured, and where it quietly leaks away before anyone gets paid. We will look at why robotics has one of the most punishing cash cycles in hardware, why the most popular business model makes it worse, and how the best operators turn that flow into a durable advantage. We will conclude by discussing how companies can think creatively about raising capital. You will leave with a clearer way to read any robotics business.
