I’m a female founder with a liberal arts degree and my company has raised $280 million. You don’t need a PhD to build a robotics startup

Before I co-founded Dexory a decade ago, I had no experience in robotics. I am a go-to-market specialist with degrees in both liberal arts and business, a fiction and fantasy obsessed reader, and I am a woman who comes from a family of doctors. My background isn’t in a lab, on a manufacturing floor or on a campus. I grew up in Romania and after studying in the UK, I spent six years working in marketing, sales, partnerships at Telefonica and Google. 

All these things make me quite unusual in my field, robotics, dominated as it is by super-qualified scientists who tend to be men. In the early days at Dexory, it wasn’t unusual to walk into a robotics meeting and be the only woman in the room.

Don’t get me wrong, things have improved. I see far more women at conferences, in customer meetings, and on our own teams. I see women leading engineering teams, building AI models, designing products, running commercial organizations, and founding startups. We should – and we do – celebrate that, but we shouldn’t mistake this progress for the finishing line. 

I’m biased, but I would argue that physical AI is one of the most exciting industries in the world right now – and robotics in particular. The machines we are building and the tech we are developing will revolutionize the world of work – and could help solve some of the existential challenges we face........

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