Tesla's Robotics Rival: Startup Founded by Ex-DeepMind Engineers Aims to Turn Customers into Robot Teachers

A startup founded by former Google DeepMind engineers has a potential solution to robotics’ long-standing data gap problem. Reimagine Robotics, led by CEO Jonathan Scholz, plans to build robots that are actually useful in real-world settings by turning its customers into robot teachers.

Scholz, who previously headed up DeepMind’s applied robotics team, founded Reimagine last year with former Google colleagues Oleg Sushkov, Akhil Raju, and Misha Denil. The London- and Sydney-based startup emerged from stealth earlier this month and is backed by VC firms Fly Ventures and Firstminute Capital.

The idea behind Reimagine’s mission to build robots that can be refined and taught in the field stems from Scholz’s experiences at Google. After three separate robotics projects he built at DeepMind failed to get beyond the pilot phase, Scholz realized the issue wasn’t with the underlying technology but how it was deployed in real-world settings.

It clicked for me that it wasn’t just a capability problem,