Workshop date & time:
June 1, 2026
Time: 09:00 – 12:30
ICRA Conference & Workshop Registration:
Register HERE
Startup companies were selected from a list of applicants wishing to contribute to this workshop.
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 researchers 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.
To achieve this, participants will take on and learn the investor perspective. Two short talks set the frame: how investors evaluate robotics opportunities and where the market is heading, and the practical challenges of building an autonomous robot.
Between talks participants work through structured case exercises, learning to recognize and analyze using transparent rubrics for technology readiness, defensibility, unit economics, and route to market. These cases will be based on real companies, with some describing themselves briefly in the workshop.
A professional investor will guide the discussion and surface blind spots. Participants leave with a concise toolkit.
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 and that originality has won 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.
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.
Short talks, interactive case work, live polling.
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.
Live polling, structured case-scoring with rubrics, and short report-outs keep participants actively engaged throughout. Dr. Robert MacKenzie is a professional workshop designer and facilitator, specializing in interaction and workshop flow.
Half-day workshop: 3 hours 30 minutes
| Time | Topic | Person / Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 – 09:10 | Welcome, objectives, tooling walkthrough | Dr. Robert MacKenzie, Ellipsis Venture |
| 09:10 – 09:20 | Quick Exercise: Try evaluating a company yourself | Dr. Robert MacKenzie, Ellipsis Venture |
| 09:20 – 09:30 | ATEC Robotics Competition Presentation | Prof. Li |
| 09:30 – 09:45 | Talk 1: How investors evaluate robotics, hot now vs. 2028 | Dr. Robert MacKenzie, Ellipsis Venture |
| 09:45 – 10:15 | Case A | A visiting startup |
| 10:15 – 10:30 | Buffer | |
| 10:30 – 11:00 | Official Coffee Break | |
| 11:00 – 11:20 | Talk 2: Challenges of building an autonomous robot | Kateryna Portmann, Women in Robotics & ANYbotics |
| 11:20 – 11:45 | Case B | A visiting startup |
| 11:45 – 12:10 | Case C | A visiting startup |
| 12:10 – 12:20 | Buffer | |
| 12:20 – 12:30 | Summary | Dr. Robert MacKenzie, Ellipsis Venture |
Organized by the Advanced Technology Exploration Community (ATEC), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Shanghai Innovation Institute
ATEC 2026 is an international robotics competition that tests whether robots can operate autonomously in open, dynamic, and unstructured real-world environments. Unlike indoor or scripted challenges, ATEC asks teams to demonstrate sustained performance across locomotion, manipulation, and environmental modification — all without remote human intervention.
The competition follows a three-stage pathway: an online simulation qualifier, real-world preliminary rounds held across Pittsburgh, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, and a Grand Final in Hong Kong (December 2026) set on natural outdoor terrain with stairs, slopes, and unstructured obstacles.
Since 2020, ATEC has run five editions, drawing nearly 5,000 teams from over 200 universities worldwide. In 2025, a team from Zhejiang University took the top prize of $150,000 USD.
