When Nicolaus Radford left Nauticus Robotics (Nasdaq: KITT), the Houston-based company he had spent a decade building, the last word he wanted to hear was “robotics.”
“Leaving Nauticus wasn’t the easiest thing to do; it was 10 years of my life from my living room to Nasdaq,” Radford said. “It was a difficult market and a difficult macro environment. I had a lot of emotion wrapped up in leaving it.”
For months, Radford’s phone was ringing off the hook with offers to work for larger companies in roles he knew he wasn’t suited for. But in May, he returned to the startup world with a new robotics concept: Persona AI.
The company aims to raise a significant amount of seed capital to build a humanoid robot capable of performing industrial labor.
Radford said the time is right for humanoid robots due to three major trends: the boom in generative artificial intelligence beginning in 2022, market demand for workers in several industries, and funding activity.
“The Achilles heel for humanoids and robotics in general has been robustness, reprogrammability, and this real-time reasoning and action,” Radford said. “Through generative AI, [solutions to those problems] are now becoming possible.”
Radford serves as Persona AI's CEO, and he is partnering with CTO Jerry Pratt. Pratt recently departed Silicon Valley robotics company Figure AI, where he was CTO, and conducted research on human and robotic leg design at the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition. The pair met at NASA’s Humanoid Robotics Lab, where Radford worked until his departure in 2014 to create the company that would become Nauticus.
The company will have two offices, one in the Ion incubator in Midtown Houston and one in Pensacola, Florida, where Pratt is located.
Radford's return to robotics came after some serious soul-searching, and part of his pitch to investors includes lessons he learned about building a technology company from scratch. He said some of the chief takeaways he's bringing to Persona include the need to avoid becoming a "cool tech company," how to conduct cheap and early market testing and — perhaps most importantly — how to not run out of money.
And market research is in Persona’s favor, the founders said. Pratt pointed to trends, especially in automotive manufacturing, shipping and industrial manufacturing, that show employers are projecting a global shortage in workers.
The Greater Houston Partnership’s most recent data showed that as of May 2024, transportation, warehousing and manufacturing had all recovered the jobs lost due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, those sectors trailed behind hospitality, health care and retail job growth. Only the energy sector continues to see fewer jobs in May 2024 than there were in May 2020.
Persona’s initial prototype will concentrate on automotive manufacturing, shipping and industrial manufacturing but has the potential to expand into other sectors like health care, Radford said. He pointed out Houston’s strengths in industrial manufacturing as one reason he wanted to keep the new company in the Bayou City.
Meanwhile, humanoid robotics companies have closed significant funding recently. Figure AI closed a $675 million funding round in February with investment from Nvidia, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Pratt left the company after the funding round, wanting to remain in Florida.
Pratt acknowledged that Persona will lead to job losses for some human workers. However, he also pointed out that some jobs can be performed more safely by robots than humans ever could, and servicing and operating the robots themselves could create more opportunities for human workers.
“To make money as a humanoid robotics company, you do, unfortunately, have to displace human workers,” Pratt said. "But a human and a machine together is much more productive than either just a human or a machine — so we're trying to find that balance."
Radford founded Nauticus Robotics as Houston Mechatronics, and the company designs robots intended to service offshore installations. Although Nauticus landed contracts with giants such as Shell PLC and Petrobras last year, the company reported that it had not made any product sales for a nine-month period ending in September 2023.
Nauticus had to furlough 14 employees in January, when Radford’s departure was announced.
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