Former Tesla Optimus AI Chief Launches Intelligent Machines, Betting on Specialized Industrial Robots Over Humanoids

Ashish Kumar, who led artificial intelligence development for Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot program, has announced the founding of Intelligent Machines, a San Francisco startup that pursues the opposite strategy: building specialized robots for narrow, demanding manufacturing and aerospace tasks rather than general-purpose machines. Kumar, who spent approximately one year leading Optimus AI before departing Tesla in September 2025, is raising roughly $100 million in seed funding—an unusually large amount for the stage—with the stated goal of automating work typically performed by highly skilled human workers. The startup has already hired multiple engineers from Tesla's Optimus team and plans to develop proprietary reinforcement learning techniques to train robots that improve through trial-and-error learning, drawing on Kumar's academic background from UC Berkeley.