PODCAST · technology
22Astronauts
by 22Astronauts with Ilir Aliu
The world was built by people not different from you. We interview founders, operators and engineers, to show you they're just like you. Hosted by Ilir Aliu.
Episodes
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Ep 112 | Why 99% Reliability Means Your Robotics Fleet Fails (w/ Joe Harris, CEO Alloy Robotics)
In Ep #112 of 22Astronauts, Ilir Aliu sits down with Joe Harris, Founder & CEO of Alloy Robotics. Before starting Alloy, Joe helped scale a consumer telehealth platform to a $1B+ acquisition. Now, he is bringing those high-growth scaling principles to physical AI. "Reliability is measured at the...
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Ep 111 | Customers Don't Want Cooking Robots, They Want Assembly (w/ Rajat Bhageria, Chef Robotics)
Rajat Bhageria is the Founder & CEO of Chef Robotics (San Francisco, CA), the leading physical AI company deploying AI-guided robot arms across food manufacturing and production facilities. Instead of chasing restaurant cooking hype or $15/hr fast-casual makelines, Chef Robotics pivoted to...
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Ep 110 | Your Factory Data Is Lying to You (w/ Silviu Homoceanu, CTO Almetra)
Almetra is turning the perception stack from self-driving cars into factory intelligence. I sat down with Silviu Homoceanu, Co-Founder & CTO of Almetra, to talk about growing up with computers in post-communist Romania, eight years inside VW's self-driving programme, and why the data most…
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Ep 109 | Inside Almond: The $8,999 Physical AI Robot (w/ Saba Khalilnaji)
Almond is building robots for the era of physical AI. I sat down with Saba Khalilnaji, Founder & CEO of Almond, inside the company's San Francisco factory to talk about building robots, scaling hardware, factory automation, and why Almond wants to become "America's robot factory." Saba started...
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Ep 108 | AI Is Inventing Hardware Humans Can't Design (w/ Prof. Mario Krenn, Feyer)
Prof. Mario Krenn is the Scientific Director & Co-Founder of Feyer GmbH and Professor for Machine Learning in Science at the University of Tübingen, where he leads the Artificial Scientist Lab. For over a decade, Mario’s research has focused on using AI not just to analyze physics data, but at a...
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Ep 107 | "We Don't Retrain Models, We Teach Them Cause & Effect" (w/ Johannes Haux)
Johannes Haux is the Co-Founder & CEO of kausable (Heidelberg, Germany), a deep-tech AI startup building reasoning-first causal foundation models. Instead of memorizing internet-scale text patterns or relying on millions of trial-and-error attempts, kausable’s models (based on the Prior-data…
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Ep 106 | "There Is Zero ROI in Home Humanoids" (w/ Nic Radford)
Nic Radford is the Co-Founder & CEO of Persona AI (Houston, TX) and former Founder/CEO of Nauticus Robotics (NASDAQ: KITT) & Lead of NASA’s Robonaut 2 and Valkyrie humanoid programs. With nearly 30 years of experience building humanoid robotics (from human-rated space manipulation at NASA Johnson...
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Ep 105 | Red Tape Cost Us a 5-Year Lead in Humanoid Robotics (w/ Jan Peters)
Prof. Dr. Jan Peters is Full Professor of Intelligent Autonomous Systems at TU Darmstadt, Department Head of Systems AI for Robot Learning (SAIROL) at DFKI, and a Founding Research Faculty Member of hessian.AI. With over 54,000 Google Scholar citations, Jan is one of the world’s most influential...
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Ep 104 | How to Train 99.9% Reliable Robots for $5 (w/ Igor Kulakov)
Igor Kulakov is the Co-Founder and CEO of MicroFactory (SimpleAutomation, Inc.), a San Francisco-based robotics startup building autonomous "factories-in-a-box" for precision electronic assembly. Backing their bet that tabletop manufacturing cells beat humanoids for real-world reliability,...
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Ep 103 | Why Robotics Hasn't Had Its ChatGPT Moment Yet (w/ Jiafei Duan)
Dr. Jiafei Duan is a Presidential Young Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Director of the MAGIC Lab (Manipulation and General Intelligence Control), and Research Scientist at A*STAR. Formerly a researcher at UW and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), Jiafei co-led the...
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Ep 102 | Why Humanoids Won’t Be in Our Homes Anytime Soon (w/ Majid Khadiv)
My conversation with Prof. Dr. Majid Khadiv, Head of the ATARI LAB (Applied and Theoretical Aspects of Robot Intelligence) and Assistant Professor at TUM (the Technical University of Munich). The ATARI Lab focuses on AI planning in dynamic environments, bridging optimal control with modern...
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Ep 101 | Investing $19M in Humanoids with Zero Robotics Experience (w/ Andrew Kang, RoboStrategy)
Andrew Kang is the Co-Founder and CEO of RoboStrategy and Managing Partner of Mechanism Capital. RoboStrategy already holds concentrated positions in industry-defining companies including Figure AI, Apptronik, Standard Bots, and Dyna Robotics. It is the first publicly listed vehicle...
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Ep 101 | Why I Bought a $25k Robot Arm for My New York Apartment (w/ Elliot Horowitz, Viam)
Eliot Horowitz is the Founder and CEO of Viam and Co-Founder of MongoDB. Viam is building the universal software platform to bridge the gap between AI and physical hardware, running everything from automated boat-sanding systems to AI sonar fleet operations. Viam: https://www.viam.com Eliot on X:...
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Ep 100 | You Need To Be 10x Better (w/ Evan Beard)
Evan Beard is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Bots, building AI-trained industrial robot arms designed to automate real factory work, not demos:In this episode, Evan shares a founder path that started in software startups and Y Combinator long before robotics. Seeing engineers at YC building...
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Ep 99 | You Can’t Be What You Can’t See (w/ Grace Brown)
Grace Brown is the founder and CEO of Andromeda, building social companion robots designed for aged care and healthcare environments: In this episode, Grace shares a founder journey that started long before a company existed. She had been building robots since her teenage years, but the real...
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Ep 98 | Discipline Is a Transferable Skill (w/ Camilla Mazzoleni)
Camilla Mazzoleni is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of FORGIS, a Zurich-based startup building an AI operating layer for industrial automation: In this episode, Camilla shares a founder journey shaped long before robotics. She grew up as a competitive alpine skier, leaving home early to...
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Ep 97 | Why Robotics Keeps Rebuilding the Same Infrastructure (w/ Stephen James)
Stephen James is the founder and CEO of Neuracore, and Assistant Professor of Robot Learning at Imperial College London: In this episode, Stephen shares his path from growing up in Wales to spending a decade at Imperial, a postdoc at Berkeley, and eventually founding Neuracore. Not because he...
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Ep 96 | Talent Didn’t Save Me, Consistency Did (w/ Steve Xie)
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel AI, building the simulation and synthetic data layer powering the next generation of embodied AI and humanoid robotics. In this episode, Steve shares a rare founder journey that starts far from robotics. From studying physics at Peking University,...
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Ep 95 | The Hard Part Is Not Training Robots. It Is Making Them Generalize (w/ Animesh Garg)
I talk with Animesh Garg,Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and one of the leading voices in robot learning today: We talk about growing up in India, building his first autonomous vehicle on a $280 budget after being rejected from a CMU program, and how that failure pushed him toward Berkeley,...
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Ep 94 | What Made Us Strong Is Now Holding Us Back (w/ Marco Huber)
In this episode, I talk with Prof. Dr. Marco Huber, Professor for Cognitive Production Systems at the University of Stuttgart and Scientific Director for AI at Fraunhofer IPA. Marco shares his journey from a middle-class upbringing with no academic role models to becoming a leading figure in...
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Ep 93 | Scaling Is Harder Than Building The First Robot (w/ Stefan Dörr-Laukien)
Stefan Dörr-Laukien is the co-founder and CEO of NODE Robotics, a Stuttgart-based company building the software layer behind scalable mobile robot fleets. In this episode, Stefan shares how his path into robotics did not start with founding ambitions, but with curiosity for how machines work.…
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Ep 92 | New Opportunities Grow From Every Failure (w/ Stephan van den Brink)
I talked with Stephan van den Brink, founder and CEO of MANUS™, the company behind some of the most advanced data gloves used in robotics: Not only robotics: teleoperation, motion capture, and embodied AI. Manus started as a small student project and grew into a deep tech company trusted across…
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Ep 91 | The Real Truth Of Autonomy Lives In The Stats (w/ Harals Schäfer)
In this episode, I talk with Harald Schäfer, CTO at comma.ai, where he is leading one of the most interesting autonomy efforts in the world: They work on end to end driving and generative world models is changing how small teams can compete with billion dollar labs. We talk about his path from...
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Ep 89 | Business Masterclass: Selling First Before Building (w/ Albane Dersy)
Albane Dersy turned down Goldman Sachs to build Inbolt, a robotics company now deployed in factories across the world. Her story is a masterclass in execution: In this episode, we talk about how Albane grew up in Paris, pushed her way through the French prep school system, and found her path into...
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Ep 90 | Why are you not throwing yourself into this? (w/ Hendrik Susemihl)
Dr. Hendrik Susemihl, CEO and Co founder of GoodBytz, shows you how fully automated kitchens can solve the labor crisis in food service and still serve better, fresher food at scale. We talk about his path from taking apart PCs as a teenager, to building large automation systems at Fraunhofer, to...
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Ep 88 | Always a Bit of a Generalist, Never Only One Thing (w/ Jon Miller Schwartz)
In this episode, I talk with Jon Miller Schwartz, co-founder and CEO of Ultra, about how to actually get robots deployed in warehouses: We walk through Jon’s journey from tearing apart electronics on a tiny New York City workbench to Harvey Mudd, early YC startups in 3D printing, and building one...
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Ep 87 | Speed Is Objectively the Most Important Thing in Life (w/ Axel Peytavin)
Axel Peytavin, co-founder & CEO of Innate, shows you how to teach real robots with language and quick demos without being a roboticist. We talk about Axel’s path from France to Stanford and why he is betting on personal robotics you can program with prompts, code, and demonstrations. He explains...
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Ep 86 | It’s Not A Hardware Problem. It’s A System Problem (w/ Tom Zhang)
Tom Zhang, founder and CEO of Daxo Robotics: with over 100 actuators they challenge everything we thought we knew about dexterity.In this episode, we talk about his journey from growing up in a mountain village in China to launching one of the most talked-about robotics startups of 2025. Tom…
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Ep 85 | Having A Company Is Maybe The Hardest Way To Get Rich (w/ Maximilian Schilling)
Maximilian Schilling, co-founder and CEO of warmwind, is building a new kind of browser where AI works like a digital employee: clicking, typing, and navigating apps visually instead of through APIs. In this episode, we talk about his mission to make automation transparent, reliable, and…
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Ep 84 | Fundamental Improvement Over Incremental Change (w/ Xavier (Tianhao) Chi)
Robots still need weeks of coding to learn one new task. Xavier (Tianhao) Chi is changing that with Mbodi AI: Mbodi helps industrial robots learn through language and demonstration. No coding, no engineers, just simple instruction. We talk about how his team is closing the gap between advanced AI...
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Ep. 83 | You Become Who You Hang Out With (w/ Ashish Kapoor)
Ashish Kapoor is building General Robotics to solve the biggest deployment problem in robotics: Getting real robots to work in the real world. In this episode, he shares how he’s doing it, and why most robotics stacks aren’t built to scale. We talk about growing up in India, studying at IIT and...
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Ep 82 | College Is Going to Be Obsolete by the End of This Decade (w/ Brian Walker)
In this episode, I talk with Brian Walker, founder and CEO of REVEL, the company building the simulation backbone for humanoid robotics. Brian’s journey started far from Silicon Valley: growing up in the Czech Republic and working on Hollywood sets like Avatar and The Mandalorian, where he helped...
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Ep 81 | Opportunities Only Arise After An Incredible Amount Of Work (w/ Jan Liphardt)
A Stanford physicist leaves academia to build open-source software for humanoid robots? I talked to OpenMind founder Jan Liphardt: OpenMind a new robotics company building an open-source, AI-native operating system for humanoid robots. We talk about being born in Germany, his upbringing in...
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Ep 80 | You Will Die If You Don’t Do It (w/ Bob van Luijt)
🎙️ I talked with Bob van Luijt, co-founder and CEO of Weaviate, the open-source vector database that's become core infrastructure for AI-native applications. We talk about how Bob grew up in a small Dutch town, started coding in QBasic, and built his first software company while still in school....
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Ep 79 | Calm Down, Slow It All Down, Let Clarity Emerge (w/ Vikash Kumar)
In this episode, I talk with Vikash Kumar, Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon and founder of MyoLab.AI, where he’s building human-embodied AI systems: We talk about growing up in a small Indian town, the influence of his mother on his early learning, and how a robotics club at IIT Kharagpur set...
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Ep 78 | Don't Start With A Whiteboard, Talk To Customers (w/Brennand Pierce)
I talked with Brennand Pierce, founder and CEO of Kinisi Robotics, where he’s building one-armed mobile manipulators: Designed to automate warehouse tasks like picking, palletizing, and labeling and many more. After nearly two decades in robotics, Bren brings a rare mix of academic depth, startup...
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Ep 77 | If Other People Can Do It, Why Not Us? (w/ Aaron Tan)
In this episode, I talk with Aaron Tan, PhD, Co-founder of Syncere, where he’s reimagining domestic robotics: A robotic lamp capable of folding laundry! One single video of the concept went viral, pulling in over 4 million views and sparking thousands of conversations online. We talk about…
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Ep 76 | Fear and Pressure Fade When Joy Takes Over (w/ Brendah Njiru)
In this episode, I talk with Brendah Njiru, founder of HOMY Robotics, where she’s building emotionally intelligent humanoid robots for senior living: With a background in neuroscience and Alzheimer’s research at Cornell, Brendah brings a rare scientific depth to robotics. We talk about her...
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Ep 75 | We Should Scale It Up Ourselves (w/ Lerrel Pinto)
In this episode, I talk with Lerrel Pinto, Assistant Professor at NYU and one of the most cited researchers in robotics today: His work spans everything from self-supervised learning to robot dexterity, and he's on a mission to make robots generalize the way humans do. We talk about growing up in...
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Ep 74 | Why Early Corporate Experience Is Valuable for Entrepreneurs (w/ Benji Barash)
I sit down with Benji Barash, CEO of Roboto AI, to talk Amazon, robotics, and why knowing what to do with your data is key to scaling: Benji spent years at Amazon working on drone delivery, but started to see a growing problem in robotics, the data was piling up faster than teams could make sense...
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Ep 73 | Learn It Yourself Before Hiring for Expertise (w/ Madison Maxey)
In this episode, I talk with Madison Maxey, founder of LOOMIA, a company building soft, flexible electronics for everything: Everything? Everything! From robotics to automotive interiors. Maddie’s journey spans fashion school, a Thiel Fellowship, a return to Stanford in her mid-20s to study...
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Ep 72 | Found the perfect track, combining science and design (w/ Matthieu Lapeyre)
Yesterday, they launched a $299 robot. It looks like a toy, but it opens up a world of AI. Today, I talk to the person who made it real. Matthieu Lapeyre is the founder of Pollen Robotics and one of the most quietly influential roboticists in Europe. He’s been building open-source humanoids long...
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Ep 71 | The Team Ends Up Like Charting the Path Too (w/ Kaan Dogrusoz)
In this episode, I talk with Kaan Dogrusoz, Co-Founder and CEO of Weave Robotics, a YC-backed team building Isaac, a personal home robot: Kaan grew up in Istanbul, chased curiosity across physics, art, and engineering, and eventually made his way to Carnegie Mellon, then Apple, where he spent...
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Ep 70 | Real Confidence Comes From The Work (w/ Benjamin Bolte)
🎙️ I talked with Benjamin Bolte, founder of K-Scale Labs, who left Meta to build something he actually believes in: an open-source humanoid robot! After working on Autopilot at Tesla, he saw the inside of Optimus and decided the big players were getting it wrong. Benjamin walks me through how he...
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Ep 69 | You can really build things with a small team (w/ Nikolaus West)
In this episode, I talk with Nikolaus West, Co-Founder & CEO of Rerun; their team is building the data stack for Physical AI: We get into the early days of Rerun: how an open-source visualization tool for multimodal data became widely adopted across robotics, spatial computing, and even inside...
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Ep 68: Personal Agency and Shaping One's Own Life (w/Chang Liu)
🎙️ I spoke with Chang Liu, founder and CEO of Extend Robotics, a startup developing intuitive VR interfaces to control robot arms and train AI models using real-world data. Chang shares his story from growing up in China to moving to the UK for university, studying at Newcastle and Southampton,...
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Ep 67: Doing Plan A to Do B Doesn’t Work (w/ Dhanush Radhakrishnan)
Took me 2 years to land this one... 🎙️ In this episode, I talk with Dhanush Radhakrishnan, Co-Founder and CEO of Clone Robotics: The company building lifelike, musculoskeletal androids that move like humans and could become the next personal computing platform. Dhanush shares how watching…
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Ep 66 | Ship One New Product Every Week Until Something Sticks (w/ Tibo Louis-Lucas)
In Episode #66, I talk with Tibo LOUIS-LUCAS, founder of Tweet Hunter and Taplio, two SaaS tools he built, scaled, and sold for over $10 million: Tibo shares how he went from a series of startup failures to shipping one new product every week with his co-founder. That process eventually led to...
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Ep 65 | The Failing Part is Not Very Valuable if You Don't Learn (w/ Victor Splittgerber)
In this episode, I talk with Victor Splittgerber, CEO of WAKU Care; a Berlin-based company redefining maintenance for robots, machines, and automation systems. Victor shares how his early curiosity (and an eBay side hustle selling Star Wars kits at 15) laid the groundwork for becoming a founder....
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Ep 64 | Degrees and Job Doesn't Matter - What Matters Is Being True (w/ Haixuan Xavier Tao)
I talked to Haixuan Xavier Tao, founder of 1ms.ai and maintainer of Dora-rs, a Rust framework linking AI and robotics for modular, cloud-first systems. Haixuan shares his personal journey growing up in a Chinese immigrant family in France, the sense of duty that shaped his career path, and…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The world was built by people not different from you. We interview founders, operators and engineers, to show you they're just like you. Hosted by Ilir Aliu.
HOSTED BY
22Astronauts with Ilir Aliu
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How many episodes does 22Astronauts have?
22Astronauts currently has 111 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is 22Astronauts about?
The world was built by people not different from you. We interview founders, operators and engineers, to show you they're just like you. Hosted by Ilir Aliu.
How often does 22Astronauts release new episodes?
22Astronauts publishes regularly with 111 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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Who hosts 22Astronauts?
22Astronauts is created and hosted by 22Astronauts with Ilir Aliu.
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