Robotics experts, including Jacob Hennessey-Rubin, co-founder of NYR (right), testifying in favor of Massachusetts’ bill to ban weaponized robots. | Source: New York Robotics
New York Robotics, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the robotics community in the New York Tri-State region, this week officially launched with more than 160 robotics startups in its ecosystem. Nearly 100 of these are in New York City alone, it said.
New York Robotics (NYR) said it hopes to establish the city as a global contender in robotics alongside hubs such as Boston, Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh, Munich, Zurich, Singapore, and Odense, Denmark. It began as a Meetup group in 2021 and has been preparing for this launch for two years, Jacob Hennessey-Rubin, the co-founder and executive director of NYR, told The Robot Report. Since 2024, NYR has organized more than 20 events.
When Hennessey-Rubin moved to New York in 2018 and worked at a robotics startup, he realized that there were many other startups in the city, along with an investment ecosystem, service providers, and a thriving academic community. What it lacked was a resource to pull these individual pieces together, Hennessey-Rubin said.
“We’ve done a lot of work in helping to grow those connections, but also to foster the natural work that’s happening within New York [state] and New York City in particular,” he said. “We kind of dropped the pebble in New York City, but we’re really growing out across the ecosystem of the whole state.”
What makes New York a good home for robotics startups?
A previous New York Robotics meetup. | Source: New York Robotics
There are lots of reasons why New York City would make an ideal home for a robotics startup, Hennessey-Rubin said. “There is such a diverse landscape here, from people, the buildings, the real estate, the environment, the built environment, and it’s an exciting opportunity to create,” he said. “I think a great example would be the FDNY robotics team headquartered on Roosevelt Island. It’s a firefighting team that uses both land, sea, and air robotic systems.”
NYR is pulling from the city’s long history of innovation, Hennessey-Rubin added. “Tesla, Edison, Bell, all those innovators worked in this region,” he said. “Long Island was a cradle of aviation, and there’s all the stuff happening in semiconductors in Upstate New York and in Western New York. The history that’s here is really exciting, and people often forget about that.”
In addition, more than 20 universities within 100 miles of Manhattan have robotics or engineering-focused programs, he said. New York is centrally located between the robotics clusters in Boston and Pittsburgh, plus Washington, D.C., where the National Robotics Caucus has restarted.
“We have a really great place where we become a central node in tethering together all of these parts of the ecosystem to really grow the robotics industry at large,” said Hennessey-Rubin. “So as much as we focus on the 160-plus companies that we have in the Tri-State area, our real focus is on supporting them from an economic and workforce development perspective, as well as connecting the dots across the country and around the globe.”
How is NYR organized?
One thing Hennessey-Rubin learned early in his journey to establish New York Robotics is that there are many different types of robotic clusters with different structures. MassRobotics, the Pittsburgh Robotics Network, Silicon Valley Robotics, and other regional organizations each provide different resources for their communities.
NYR has focused on a public-private model, he said. Last summer, its team and an intern from Columbia University looked at more than 100 robotic support organizations (RSOs) around the world.
“We cataloged all these folks from incubators, accelerators, and venture studios that were specific to robotics or had some kind of robotics focus,” Hennessey-Rubin recalled. “We narrowed that down to a select group and started to interview to better understand their business models, what they were doing right and wrong, as well as some of the business things around how many people they were graduating, what kind of capital they raised, and how many IPOs they had.”
“From that, we took an understanding that, in order to really propel the industry and ourselves forward, we needed to first go into that private funding model. That allows us to broaden the scope of what we’re doing,” he said. “Nothing against the public-funded models, but they often pigeonhole you into a specific KPI [key performance indicator] or a task that needs to be done. To get ourselves off the ground, we focused on private links.”
NYR has 10 founding partners, as well as annual and strategic partners. They include J.P. Morgan, AlleyCorp, Informa Markets, Interwoven Ventures, Standard Bots, Monozukuri Ventures, Cybernetix Ventures, and Newlab, among others.
What are the key sectors for robotics in NYC?
New York-based startup Monumental Labs uses robots for stone carving. Human craftspeople finish the sculptural work. | Source: Monumental Labs
The variety of businesses in New York City provides robotics startups many resources for identifying markets and developing products, said Hennessey-Rubin.
“An interesting thing about New York is that it gives that opportunity to develop [robots] here, manufacture it here, and test it here,” he said. “New York becomes a kind of Petri dish of all the opportunities for all the things that happen in the robotics ecosystem.”
While NYR isn’t limiting itself to any specific industries, it does have a few strategic focuses. Hennessey-Rubin said medical fields, including lab automation, pharmaceuticals, hospital logistics, and biotech field, is one area of interest.
Construction is another focus, as well as manufacturing, warehousing, supply chain, and logistics. New York also offers unique opportunities for retail, food, and hospitality robots, said Hennessey-Rubin.
“One I’m most excited for is robotics in art and theater,” he added. “It comes through my background in design and manufacturing. We’ve seen robots both on stage and behind the camera.”
New York Robotics launches the NYR Index
Along with its launch, NYR released a private beta version of the NYR Index, a proprietary ecosystem intelligence tool to give partners exclusive access to data, insights, and mapping across startups, investors, labs, and enterprise participants.
“It’s all about relationships. Building this index was meant to get a lot of the information in our heads into a place where people could access it,” Hennessey-Rubin said. “Our service providers and ecosystem partners are really interested in providing their services for those startups in this really amazing, growing industry. So it’s creating a system that allows for that community to come together and learn about each other in an online digital platform.”
NYR also plans to launch a Discord channel in the coming weeks as a digital place for founders to connect in addition to in-person events. The organization also expects to continue growing the jobs section of its website.
“That Career Center is really going to help kind of bring that traction,” Hennessey-Rubin said. “In January, our newsletter had over 50 jobs in it from the Tri-State area [New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut]. It’s very exciting to see that kind of growth happening when people look at New York and don’t often think about robotics happening here.”
What comes next for NYR?
New York Robotics participating in a panel at New York Tech Week. | Source: New York Robotics
One of New York Robotics’ biggest priorities moving forward is to be an active part of the robotics community across the country. It plans to send representatives at upcoming trade shows and industry events. NYR could eventually establish a physical location to aid startups, but it is currently more focused on events, said Hennessey-Rubin.
“There is definitely interest in establishing that space, mostly to provide those resources. At the same time, our focus is on supporting the ecosystem broadly, and not necessarily just being a landlord or taking care of a piece of real estate,” he noted. “There are also plenty of other partners that we can work with, such as Newlab.”
“As a nonprofit, we’re always looking at the fundraising aspect to grow the team and to be able to support the ecosystem we’re developing,” Hennessey-Rubin continued. “It’s really about spreading the awareness and figuring out ways to better quantify and qualify the impact.”
Is NYR planning to work with local, state, and federal governments?
“We’ll be having those conversations with our lawmakers so that they’re aware that what we’re doing is really important,” Hennessey-Rubin replied. “Nationally and globally, it’s safe to say that the embodied AI portion has been left out of the policy conversation, but it’s also a fairly new process. So you know, we want to make sure that we allow ourselves to put that flag in the ground.”
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