November 2017

We are honored to announce that Gleb Chuvpilo is joining Rewired full time as a Managing Partner, promoted from Venture Partner. We have also officially opened the doors to our office in Lausanne, Switzerland.

An integral member of our team since the beginning, Gleb is invaluable in helping us identify, validate, and collaborate with our growing list of portfolio companies.

He brings to Rewired both venture experience and deep technical expertise, with a Master’s degree from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and an MBA in Finance and Strategic Management from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

A seasoned investor in the space, Gleb previously managed AI-driven quantitative trading portfolios at Goldman Sachs ($10 billion AUM) and Clarium (Peter Thiel’s $6 billion global macro fund). Gleb also helped Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian launch an early-stage venture fund focusing on investments in Y Combinator startups.

Gleb’s field experience in Artificial Intelligence includes building AI algorithms at Palantir Technologies (an In-Q-Tel backed Silicon Valley startup), and co-founding several technology startups, including Authy (Y Combinator class 2012, acquired by Twilio), Ride (with Uber co-founder Oscar Salazar, funded by TPG and Bono, acquired by Enterprise Holdings), and Pager (also with Oscar Salazar, funded by New Enterprise Associates and Ashton Kutcher).

Our team is by far our greatest asset, and for their time and knowledge, we are grateful.

In addition to welcoming Gleb full time, we are expanding our physical offices to Switzerland, in addition to our existing office in London. We have been spending more time there than not already, and securing the perfect launchpad space has been a priority over the past year. We’ve finally found it.

This space is a great place for us to work, house portfolio companies, and host the Swiss robotics community as often as we can. We’re still scouting for our studio space, which will be considerably larger given the specialized equipment it will house.

Chris Anderson, the founder of 3D Robotics, remarked last year that “Switzerland is the Silicon Valley of robotics.”

This has been validated by the influx of technology companies and the concentration of impressive talent. The region has a rich history of precision engineering, itself driven by a culture obsessed with building things that last.

Our Lausanne office is the first step towards our full studio space, due to be opened in 2018. We are making steady progress towards building a global hub for interdisciplinary innovation that will generate new forms of human-machine collaboration across an increasingly broad spectrum of activities.

The Lausanne office will be fully staffed, and open for business. We can’t wait to welcome you.

Since opening our doors for business earlier this year, we have grown our incredible team and added to our portfolio in a meaningful way. We set out with an ambitious goal, to unlock the next-generation of robotics. We’re well on our way.

You’ll be seeing a lot more from us soon. Stay tuned.

When we arrived at the SwissTech Convention Center in the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), we were greeted by an astronaut legend and his lunar rover. This opening scene set the tone for the rest of our visit.

During the following eight hours, we had the privilege of meeting and speaking to some of the top minds globally in robotics and artificial intelligence. These individuals are pushing the envelope in areas such as wearable robotics, locomotion, machine perception, educational robots, human-machine interface, and autonomous navigation. They’re also creating dozens of spin-offs commercializing applications of these technologies.

It was a diverse exhibition with participants from the top research centers in Switzerland including EPFL, ETH Zurich, University of Zurich and IDSIA ( Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artificial) in Lugano.

An interesting trend throughout the exhibition was the distinct focus on the humanitarian benefits of robotics.

Faithful to the founding ethos of NCCR Robotics, which lays out the “objective of developing new, human-oriented robotic technology for improving our quality of life,” presenters were sure to highlight how their respective technologies are having a positive impact on humanity. Notably, there was not a single weapons system or defense robot, a sharp contrast with conferences in other parts of the world where research is heavily funded by defense budgets.

The exhibition was truly a playground of exciting innovation, but one area that particularly piqued my interest was rehabilitation robotics.

EMG-controlled hand exoskeletons, soft exoskeletons for gravity assistance, prosthetic technologies that have shown to reverse paralysis, and groundbreaking spinal cord stimulation therapies were all present. At Rewired, we’re especially excited about this space given the advances coming out of the Swiss ecosystem where specialized talent is densely concentrated.

Prof. Robert Riener from the Sensory-Motor Systems Lab at ETHZ discussed the positive social impact of robotics entering the physical therapy industry. Prior to robotic-assisted therapy, a nurse working to rehabilitate arm movements, for example, would work with patients by physically helping them perform upper limb routines. This kind of manual rehabilitation work is tiring to perform for sprints longer than 20 minutes.

With a robot assistant, therapists can focus on directing the sessions without exerting themselves, allowing for far greater endurance and repetition in the rehab training. This matters because the brain requires a lot of training to learn a new skill or recover from a lesion through plasticity – in fact, babies perform almost 500,000 steps per month when they are learning to walk.

Robots are making therapies more effective and efficient and will become indispensable tools in this $107 billion market globally.

Here at Rewired, we are driven by a more humanitarian application of robotics. As evidenced by our time at the Swiss Robotics Industry Day, we are hopeful that these technologies will help fundamentally change the world for good.