Jerry Pratt and Figure quietly parted ways last month. The MIT researcher spent just under two years with the Bay Area-based robotics company. In 2022, he left Boardwalk Robotics, a humanoid startup he founded and led, and joined the well-funded ranks of Figure as CTO months before coming out of stealth.
Just last week, however, Pratt went public with his exit. The news has arrived via LinkedIn, as he announced the establishment of another entry into the increasingly crowded humanoid world. Persona AI is currently both early and early stage, having been officially founded just last month.
The startup is the brainchild of Pratt and longtime partner Nic Radford, an industry vet with his own impressive resume, including seven years as part of NASA robotics before founding Nauticus Robotics and Jacobi Motors.
“We wanted to get some early indications from both people who wanted to work with us and investors that if we did something like this on LinkedIn, it wouldn’t fall flat on its face,” Radford told TechCrunch.
The news was as much a hiring announcement as it was a brand reveal. “Hey LinkedIn!” Pratt noted enthusiastically on the company’s website. “Ever dreamed of creating your own Iron Man suit, but without the role of the billionaire playboy?”
Radford and Pratt say they want to bring in an additional 10 to 20 “founders” (their quotes) to help shape the company. “Jerry and I are obviously a key part of this,” Radford said, “but so will the next 18 people. We really want to show them the spirit of the company.”
At this early stage, Persona’s pitch doesn’t stray too far from the various anthropomorphic companies it’s set to compete with. The introductory text on her website is largely a celebration of those technological breakthroughs that underlie this unique moment in robotics.
The founders write:
Now is a good time to commercialize humanoids. Computer vision and perception algorithms can now detect motion, recognize and segment objects, and calculate poses at a frame rate. Electronics and computing have shrunk in size and increased in performance so that they can reside entirely in a robot and not strain the energy budget. The mobility and handling algorithms are now capable enough to maneuver around rooms and do commercially useful work. Machine learning increases the capabilities of robots while reducing the programming burden. investors are beginning to believe in the potential of humanoids. and commercial entities are requesting humanoid robots in various applications where they can add real value.
That’s about as deep as the tone is right now outside of investor decks and employee interviews. What advantage he thinks Persona will ultimately have over Agility, Boston Dynamics, Figure and the rest isn’t clear at this very early stage.
“In some ways it will be very similar, in other ways it will be different,” Radford replied cryptically. “It’s like the way GM feels against Ford or Toyota or any car company. Every company feels, deep down, that it has certain competitive advantages. And then, deep down, every company commoditizes and boils down to the same things. All provide transportation. Do we have our own version of the Dodge Hemi? We would like to think about it.”
Pratt, for one, felt confident enough in Persona’s vision to leave an early position at one of the most prominent and best-funded humanoid robotics companies, Figure. Pratt says the split was amicable, and when I spoke with Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock last week about his new project, Cover, he spoke highly of his former CTO. Pratt says the decision was, in part, geographic.
“I was going between Pensacola [Florida] and California every two weeks,” Pratt said. “At first when I joined Figure, I thought [Pratt and his wife] could move to California in about two years. I had planned to do it, but it’s really not going to work out for me. It was a pretty mutual parting of ways.”
Instead of setting up shop in a traditional robotics hotbed like Boston or Pittsburgh, Persona will split its operations between Pratt’s home of Pensacola and Houston. The latter will serve as the company’s main headquarters, eventually housing about two-thirds of Persona’s staff.
