Carnegie Robotics has quietly reached a deal to more than double in size beyond its Lawrenceville headquarters.
The company recently reached an agreement for a long-term lease with The Buncher Co. to take 35,000 square feet at the Buncher Business Center, a warehouse building along the Lawrenceville riverfront.
The deal is for more space than the company currently operates out of its current home near the Lawrenceville Technology Center, a 30,000-square-foot former steel mill Carnegie Robotics originally leased from the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern Pennsylvania just shy of a decade ago. It was a time when Carnegie Robotics was still mostly a startup taking an unusually large amount of space in which it expected the need to expand.
Now almost a decade later, Carnegie Robotics is making strategic commitments for expansion for a business that is profitable and in need of more room, necessitating the deal for the Buncher property as well as thinking about future needs beyond it.
Carnegie Robotics plans to use the additional space for the continued build-out and testing of its advanced autonomous solutions for high-end, military-grade robotic sensors, which then go on to be fitted to various types of equipment used in agriculture, construction, defense, mining and other industries. The 160-person company manufactures its camera sensors in-house in addition to testing them on devices like drones and off-road vehicles.
"It's kind of a full service here," Mike Embrescia, chief development officer at Carnegie Robotics, said. "This is not a reactionary move meaning that we are not reacting to a new partner or a new client. This is a strategic move. … It's a capacity issue."
Embrescia likened the new expansion to the company's origins more than a decade ago when CEO John Bares founded it as a spin-out of the National Robotics Engineering Center. It was then that Carnegie Robotics first began operations out of a trailer before it doubled to two trailers. Four years later in 2014, it moved into its current space — the five-acre site of the long-closed Heppenstall Co. steel plant, which Embrescia and his colleagues affectionately refer to as "The Big Blue Building."
Growth at the company has been incremental, Embrescia said. He noted that the company is actively recruiting, but it's not looking to double its employee count simply because it has doubled its footprint. If Carnegie Robotics could hire 15 to 20 people within the next six-to-nine months, then it'd be in "a really strong place," Embrescia said.
Brian Goetz, an executive vice president at The Buncher Co., expressed interest in helping Carnegie with its future needs in a prepared statement in which he said he was thrilled to land them.
“Since their founding in 2010, we think Carnegie Robotics has been one of the most innovative robotics firms in the region, and we are thrilled to add them to a growing list of AI and Robotics firms that are choosing The Buncher Co. to solve their real estate needs," he said. "We look forward to working with the Carnegie Robotics team on their future plans for growth.”
Buncher now hosts two robotics firms at the Buncher Business Center, with Carnegie Robotics on one end of the property and IAM Robotics on the other, where it moved into 30,000 square feet before the pandemic.
Carnegie Robotics was proactive in pursuing the space at Buncher Business Center, taking what was originally a sublease from its predecessor, a company called Amarr Garage Doors, for a space that never quite went vacant or was marketed as available. Since then, Carnegie Robotics has reached a direct deal with Buncher.
"We found the closest available commercial property to our space," said Embrescia, who was quick to praise Buncher as more of a partner than a landlord.
The new address will also serve as an office for Thoro AI, a Carnegie Robotics spin out for which it still owns a 50% stake, he added.
Having two buildings in such close proximity gives Carnegie Robotics some new options for space planning that it is still working through, said Embrescia, as the company has managed to dramatically ramp up production through the pandemic.
"We’re really taking a deep dive into what we’re going to do with our production facility," he said of the space dedicated to production in its main building.
He detailed how much more production the company is able to achieve now.
It was in the year before the pandemic in 2019 when Carnegie Robotics first became ramping up production, typically of high-end military grade robotic sensors.
Recalling how rolling out 50 or 60 items off the production line then inspired celebration, Embrescia said this year Carnegie Robotics pumped out 5,000 to 6,000 units.
"That growth through the pandemic is pretty remarkable," he said, noting how staff moved traditional R&D functions into their garages and basements. "R&D was happening through a very disparate fashion."
Embrescia emphasized RIDC continues to be a key partner with which it has a 25-year lease in its established building.
With the development firm considering plans to put up a new building at the Lawrenceville Technology Center between Carnegie Robotics and RIDC's Tech Forge, Embrescia suggested his company may have future interest in it, although there's no commitments yet for a project still pretty speculative.
"We certainly are working with them," he said of RIDC. "We are invested in each other's growth."
