Jerry Pratt and Figure quietly parted ways last month. Pratt was a research scientist at MIT after spending just under two years at the Bay Area-based robotics company. In 2022, Pratt left Boardwalk Robotics, the humanoid startup he founded and led, to become the well-funded CTO of Figure a few months before the company emerged from stealth.
But it was only last week that Pratt announced his departure. The news came via LinkedIn, where he announced he was founding a new entrant into the increasingly competitive world of humanoids. Persona AI was officially founded just last month and is currently in the early stages.
The startup is the brainchild of Pratt and longtime collaborator Nick Radford, an industry veteran with a distinguished career that included seven years at NASA's robotics division before founding Nauticus Robotics and Jacobi Motors.
“We wanted to get early indications, both from people who wanted to work with us and from investors, that doing something like this at LinkedIn wouldn't fail,” Radford told TechCrunch.
The news was as much a hiring announcement as it was a brand announcement. “Hey, LinkedIn!” Pratt gushed on the business site. “Have you ever dreamed of building your own Iron Man suit, minus the billionaire playboy part?”
Radford and Pratt said they hope to bring on 10 to 20 more “founders” (as they put it) to help shape the company. “Jerry and I are obviously the core of the business, but the next 18 people will play key roles, too. We want to give them a sense of company spirit,” Radford said.
At this early stage, Persona's pitch isn't all that different from those of the various humanoid companies it will compete with: The blurb on its website mostly celebrates the technological breakthroughs that form the foundation of this unique moment in robotics.
The founders wrote:
It's a great time to commercialize humanoids. Computer vision and recognition algorithms can now detect motion, identify and segment objects, and estimate pose at frame rates. Electronics and computation have shrunk in size and increased in performance so that a robot can be fully equipped with them without draining the energy budget. Locomotion and manipulation algorithms are powerful enough to navigate around a room and perform commercially useful tasks. Machine learning is improving robots' capabilities while reducing the programming burden. Investors are beginning to believe in the potential of humanoids, and commercial organizations are seeking humanoid robots in a variety of applications where they can add real value.
That's all the presentation content is available for now, outside of investor decks and employee interviews. It's not clear at this very early stage what advantages Persona ultimately thinks it will have over Agility, Boston Dynamics, Figure, etc.
“In some ways it's very similar, but in other ways it's different,” Radford replied enigmatically. “It's the same way GM feels about Ford and Toyota and other car companies. Deep down, they all feel they have a certain competitive advantage. And deep down, they're all commoditized and boiled down to the same thing. They all provide transportation. Do we have an American version of the Dodge Hemi? I'd like to think so.”
Pratt was confident enough in Persona's vision that he stepped down from his position as head of Figure, one of the best-known and best-funded companies in the humanoid robotics space. Pratt said the parting was amicable, and when he spoke with Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock last week about his new project, Cover, he spoke highly of his former CTO. Pratt said the decision was also driven by geography.
“I'm Pensacola [Florida] “When I first got involved in figure skating, [Pratt and his wife] I was going to move to California after about the second year. I thought I would, but it just didn't work out. It was a mutually agreeable breakup.”
Rather than being based in traditional robotics hubs like Boston or Pittsburgh, Persona will split its operations between Pratt's home base of Pensacola and Houston, which will serve as the company's main headquarters and will eventually house about two-thirds of Persona's staff.