The founders of Persona are sure that the world could use another humanoid robot

Jerry Pratt and Figura quietly split last month. The MIT scientist spent lower than two years at the Bay Area-based robotics company. In 2022, he left Boardwalk Robotics, the humanoid startup he founded and led, and joined the well-funded ranks of Figura as CTO a number of months before coming out of hiding.

However, it was only last week that Pratt made his departure public. The message has arrived via LinkedInas he announced the launch of another entry in the increasingly crowded world of humanoids. Persona AI is currently in as early a stage as possible, having only been officially founded last month.

The startup is the brainchild of Pratt and longtime collaborator Nic Radford, an industry veteran with a powerful resume of his own, including seven years in NASA robotics before founding Nauticus Robotics and Jacobi Motors.

“We wanted to get early signals from both people who wanted to work with us and investors that if we did something like this on LinkedIn, it wouldn’t be a flop,” Radford told TechCrunch.

The news was as much a hiring announcement because it was a brand reveal. “Hey LinkedIn!” Pratt remarked enthusiastically on the business website. “Have you ever dreamed of creating your own Iron Man suit, but without being a billionaire playboy?”

Radford and Pratt say they wish to hire a further 10-20 “founders” (their quotes) to assist shape the company. “Jerry and I are obviously a key part of this process,” Radford said, “but so are another 18 people. We really want to illustrate to them the company’s esprit de corps.”

At this early stage, Persona’s offerings don’t stray too removed from the various humanoid firms it goals to compete with. The introductory text on the company’s website is essentially a celebration of the technological breakthroughs that underpin this unique moment in robotics.

The founders write,

Now is a great time to commercialize humanoids. Computer vision and perception algorithms can now detect motion, discover and segment objects, and estimate poses at frame rates; electronics and computing systems have shrunk and increased efficiency so that they may be fully integrated into the robot without burdening the energy budget; mobility and manipulation algorithms are now competent enough to maneuver around rooms and perform commercially useful work; machine learning increases robot capabilities while reducing programming burden; investors are starting to imagine in the potential of humanoids; and business entities are on the lookout for humanoid robots for various applications where they will provide real added value.

That’s about so far as the pitch goes now, beyond investor presentations and worker interviews. Any advantage Persona ultimately believes it would have over Agility, Boston Dynamics, Figure, and the rest is not clear at this very early stage.

“It will be very similar in some ways, different in others,” Radford replied cryptically. “It’s like how GM feels in comparison with Ford or Toyota or some other automobile company. Every company feels, deep inside, that it has certain competitive benefits. And then, deep inside, every company is commoditized and reduced to the same things. All of them provide transportation. Do now we have our version of the Dodge Hemi? We’d prefer to think so.”

Pratt, for instance, was confident enough in Persona’s vision that he left a top job at one of the most distinguished and best-funded humanoid robotics firms, Figure. Pratt says the split was amicable, and once I spoke to Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock last week about his latest project, Cover, he spoke highly of his former CTO. Pratt says the decision was partly geographic.

“I flew between Pensacola (Florida) and California every two weeks,” Pratt said. “At first, when I joined Figure, I thought (Pratt and his wife) would be able to move to California in about two years. I planned to do it, but it just didn’t work out. It was quite a mutual parting of the ways.”

Instead of establishing shop in a standard robotics hotbed like Boston or Pittsburgh, Persona will split its operations between Pratt’s home in Pensacola and Houston. The latter shall be the company’s headquarters and ultimately roughly two-thirds of Persona’s employees will work there.