For the first two years of his company's launch, Robert Szczerba said he has been keeping Carnegie Foundry LLC in "stealth mode."
But now, with a recently announced leading investment from specialty vehicle and equipment manufacturer Oshkosh Corp. from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Szczerba said he's ready to use the Foundry to work with those developing robotics and AI-based intellectual property coming out of Carnegie Mellon University and place them into product mode, with the eventual goal to then spin off these ideas into standalone companies. The Foundry also will equip the founders of these ideas with the business and engineering expertise needed to survive independently.
Szczerba, who co-founded the organization alongside its CTO Herman Herman and EVP of Business Development Jeff Legault, said he expects to launch eight to 10 of these companies in and around the Pittsburgh area over the next four to five years.
"Think of it as we're a little bit like a holding company, where we do the first investment in the spinoff," Szczerba said. "We're going to be trying to do this every so often. … We're going to still own a large chunk of the companies, we're going to have our own management team oversee them until we can bring in other people, so we're going to have our hands on a lot of these different companies that overlap with some of the core skill sets, like leveraging HR skills across all those (companies)."
"The startups don't really have to worry about marketing or HR or figuring out payroll or insurance and medical and stuff like that," he added. "We can do all that for them."
The purpose of the Foundry goes beyond supplying these startups with essential business services, though. Szczerba said many of these smaller emerging robotics concepts need specific subject area expertise, but that expertise might only be needed for a short period of an idea's initial launch period. With the Foundry, these startups will have immediate access to CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center's already existing engineering skill base, which will be subcontracted to provide services for these aspiring companies.
"We're leveraging the engineering talent that's already there," Szczerba said. "We don't need to go out and rapidly hire three engineers for this and six engineers for that. We have the engineering talent already there at NREC that we can leverage."
Szczerba also noted that the Foundry isn't looking to offer an incubator model for new companies right now, but rather to grow these companies independently following the select identification of potential business ideas coming out of CMU relating to robotics.
"Basically, we're trying to change the way people do business in Pittsburgh in the robotics space," Szczerba said. "It doesn't have to be one guy in their garage trying to build something up. We're starting off with a large amount of capital and working closely with Carnegie Mellon to grow these businesses."
Szczerba said the latest round of investment from Oshkosh sets Carnegie Foundry's valuation at nearly $100 million, though he declined to specify further financial terms of the deal. The Foundry has complete flexibility in investing the money from Oshkosh into any startups it wants, Szczerba said and, in exchange, Oshkosh obtains the right of first refusal to any of the spinoffs while gaining access to the IP from the startups and the opportunity to invest in potential future Series A or B rounds of funding.
"For a company coming out of seed round, coming out of stealth, to kind of get that valuation that early is pretty nice," Szczerba said of the nearly $100 million valuation but noted that the Foundry is still looking for other investors.
A previous version of this article implied that Carnegie Mellon University is a founding partner of Carnegie Foundry which is inaccurate. The university has not invested in the organization but it will work with Carnegie Foundry in certain capacities.
