Type: Workshop
Duration: Half-day (3 hours 45 minutes)
Website: ellipsis-venture.com/icra2026
Robotics founders and researchers face the same hard question: What makes a robotics company fundable, durable, and worth your years?
This workshop brings investors, operators, and scientists together to decode how investment decisions are made, why robotics companies often fail, and which areas are heating up now and likely to compound by 2028.
Three short talks set the frame: evaluating technical risk vs adoption risk, failure patterns from seed to Series B, and theses on platform shifts in perception, manipulation, and embodied AI.
Between talks participants work through structured case exercises: one deep tech, one application-heavy, learning to score using transparent rubrics for technology readiness, defensibility, unit economics, and route to market.
A closing panel/help desk stress-tests the outcomes and surfaces blind spots. The session can be hybrid and participatory by design, with live polling, breakout scoring, and lightning founder pitches. Participants leave with a concise toolkit: checklists, scorecards, benchmark data, and a reading list. Target audience spans early-career researchers, founders, and industry R&D leaders.
No prior fundraising experience required. Bring curiosity and an honest look at your own roadmap.
We recognize that this workshop is atypical for ICRA, yet we hope the workshop's originality wins us a slot. Why? Robotics entrepreneurship is surging while capital has tightened. Quality decisions about what to build, and what to fund, directly shape which systems reach the world. This workshop turns implicit investor heuristics into explicit, inspectable tools. It centers failure analysis, which is underrepresented at conferences relative to success stories. It pushes beyond generic startup advice with domain-specific artifacts: TRL-to-MRL mapping for robotics, integration burden scoring, test-time cost models for autonomy features, and safety-critical deployment gates. The result increases the signal-to-noise ratio for founders, research labs, and investors. It complements ICRA's technical depth with pragmatic pathways to impact and anchors discussion in emerging domains and economies, consistent with the call.
Short talks, interactive case work, live polling, panel, lightning pitches. Hybrid friendly.
Dr. Robert MacKenzie is a professional workshop designer and facilitator, specializing in interaction and workshop flow. Printed and digital scorecards, QR polls, room microphones/sound, online tools for Q&A, explicit prompts for early-career voices. Remote participation via streamed talks plus moderated online video chat can be arranged in discussion with ICRA.
This workshop can also be conducted fully in-room. This structure mixes expert input with active practice and creates near-term feedback loops for attendees who cannot travel.
Participants will gain practical tools and frameworks for evaluating robotics ventures, understanding failure patterns, and identifying emerging opportunities. The workshop provides actionable scorecards, checklists, and decision frameworks that can be immediately applied to research projects or startup ideas.
Half-day workshop: 3 hours 45 minutes
| Time | Topic | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 - 00:10 | Welcome, objectives, tooling walkthrough | — |
| 00:10 - 00:25 | Talk 1: How investors actually evaluate robotics, hot now vs. 2028 | Yariv Adan, Ellipsis Venture |
| 00:25 - 01:10 | Case A: Perception-heavy platform, breakout scoring and report-outs | — |
| 01:10 - 01:20 | Stretch Break | — |
| 01:20 - 01:35 | Talk 2: Challenges of building an autonomous robot | Dr. Christian Gehring, ANYbotics |
| 01:35 - 02:20 | Case B: Vertical solution with service revenue, scoring and report-outs | — |
| 02:20 - 02:30 | Stretch Break | — |
| 02:30 - 02:45 | Talk 3: Why robotics companies fail, patterns and countermeasures | Dr. Robert MacKenzie, Ellipsis Venture |
| 02:45 - 03:15 | Panel: Scores vs reality, pushback, audience cross-examination | — |
| 03:15 - 03:30 | Summary, resources | — |
| 03:30 - 03:45 | Buffer | — |
| Optional | Lightning pitches OR Networking | — |