For decades, the biggest advances in robotics came out of university labs. Now, as billions pour into physical AI, the researchers behind that work are launching and joining startups.
The latest to recruit from academia is the German company Microagi. The startup has hired Animesh Garg, a Georgia Tech professor and former Nvidia researcher, as chief research officer, the company exclusively told Business Insider.
Garg will lead its work on post-training, adapting general-purpose robotics models into systems capable of performing specific tasks. He is bringing seven members of his research group with him through Microagi’s acquisition of a startup the group had been building in stealth. Garg and Microagi declined to disclose the terms of the deal.
Microagi raised $55 million this summer in the largest seed round raised by a German startup, Business Insider previously reported. The company works with manufacturers in the automotive, logistics, and food industries to train robots for factory jobs. It uses data collected from workers to adapt general-purpose robotics models to each customer’s operations.
Garg’s move comes as money pours into robotics and physical AI, fueled by advances in AI, falling hardware costs, labor shortages, and pressure to automate and reshore manufacturing.
The boom is also drawing more robotics researchers to startups. Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta cofounded Skild AI, which has raised more than $2 billion to build a general-purpose AI “brain” for robots. Stanford professor Chelsea Finn and UC Berkeley professor Sergey Levine cofounded Physical Intelligence, another startup developing general-purpose robot models that has raised more than $1 billion. This summer, MIT professor Russ Tedrake brought Walden Robotics out of stealth.
Garg said he decided to join Microagi because robotics is rapidly moving from impressive lab demonstrations toward large-scale commercial deployment.
“The technology has crossed a threshold,” Garg told Business Insider. “We have gotten to a point where we can create sustainable businesses.”
Garg has spent more than 15 years researching how robots learn. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, completed a postdoc at Stanford, and held faculty positions at the University of Toronto and Georgia Tech. He also served as chief scientific officer at humanoid robot maker Apptronik from 2024 to 2025.
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At Nvidia, Garg worked on simulation technology that was eventually incorporated into Isaac Lab, Nvidia’s open-source platform for training robots virtually. His more recent research has focused on teaching robots from human demonstrations and helping them improve through experience.
That work matches Microagi’s approach. The startup collects data from people performing physical tasks, including workers wearing cameras and sensor-equipped gloves, and uses it to train robots.
CEO Bercan Kilic told Business Insider that Microagi wants to help deploy at least 10 million robots for customers over the next five years.
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