Standard Bots, founded by Evan Beard, is a U.S.-based robotics company building AI-native industrial robot arms and the full hardware-software-AI stack to revive American manufacturing competitiveness; after a decade of deep vertical integration — designing their own motors, controllers, electronics, and factory automation — they now deploy hundreds of robots across Fortune 500s, defense, and small businesses in nearly every state, aiming to become a platform-defining company on the scale of Apple or Nvidia.
The crisis in U.S. manufacturing and why robots are the lever
China installs nine times more robots than the U.S. and more than the rest of the world combined; the U.S. is no longer competitive in manufacturing and falls further behind daily.
Robots are not just another hardware category — they are the category that makes everything else: semiconductors, medicines, defense systems, energy infrastructure.
Evan Beard has testified twice to Congress (Joint Economic Committee and House Science Committee) on this urgency.
Manufacturing is the heart of the American middle class; offshoring those jobs eroded economic mobility, and the only way to reverse the trend is making U.S. workers more productive through robotics.
Sourcing high-quality parts at volume, low cost, and short lead times remains extremely difficult in the U.S., forcing some offshore dependence despite the goal of domestic production.
Standard Bots’ product: the RO1 arm and an accessibility-first platform
The flagship product is the RO1, a six-axis industrial robot arm designed, manufactured, and programmed entirely in-house.
Deployed across automotive, aerospace, oil and gas, defense, and small-to-medium businesses in almost every U.S. state.
Customers include Lockheed Martin, Verizon, NASA, and hundreds of smaller shops.
Core differentiation: an iPad-based interface that lets anyone with no robotics experience create a routine in ~15 minutes; no memorizing menus, no three-day certification courses, no integrator lock-in.
“Locate skill” example: instead of programming 60 individual points for 60 parts, the robot uses vision to find and pick each part dynamically — if something shifts, it adapts rather than breaking.
The platform is modular — “industrial Legos” — so customers can configure six arms on a mobile base or any form factor that maximizes ROI for their application.
Every robot ships immediately; demand has always outpaced supply.
Evan Beard’s path: from web design to self-taught robotics PhD
Started building websites in sixth grade; studied computer science at Duke; went through Y Combinator building a personal CRM.
At YC, a partner was building eight-foot humanoid robots with a full machine shop in the office — that exposure planted the seed.
After YC, the partner gave Beard books on electrical and mechanical engineering; he self-taught at nights and weekends, realizing robotics was the life’s work.
Early years were essentially a self-taught PhD: designing motors, motor controllers, firmware for commutation, and the full electromechanical stack from scratch.
First prototype took weeks; first 100 robots took six to seven years.
Friends staged an intervention urging him to quit — no shipped product after years of effort.
Bootstrapped with a tiny team: Beard did software and electrical; co-founder did mechanical.
First robot was a plastic home robot; gears stripped, teaching the need for rigorous FEA and mechanical engineering.
Prototyped at home in Westchester on a 3D printer running all night; wife complained about the noise; daily uncertainty about whether each failure would sink the project.
Wife once described him as “a naked artist painting in the garage” — he decided external perception didn’t matter; the conviction held.
Customer discovery (YC’s “make something people want”) drove the product: spoke to 100 customers, learned existing robots were too hard to use, teams could only hit start/stop/reset after paying $50k for installation.
Vertical integration and the New York factory
Headquartered in New York, not Silicon Valley, because retention matters: SV average tenure ~1 year; hard problems require people who stay.
Factory currently ~30,000 sq ft, expanding to 70,000 sq ft; growing so fast they add space every six months.
Full vertical integration: every electronic board designed in-house and manufactured on-site in their SMT (surface-mount technology) room.
SMT line: bare boards → pick-and-place machines placing thousands of components/minute → manual inspection for large components → AOI (automated optical inspection) camera verifying placement and bonding → finished boards ready same week.
In-house board production means design changes iterate in 1–2 days instead of 6–8 weeks; also insulates from geopolitical supply restrictions.
Vertical integration extends across modalities: they aim to bring every manufacturing process for the robot in-house.
Hardware is hard: designing for mass manufacturing reveals mistakes late; the team learned by doing, iterating through painful cycles.
Technical strategy: reliability over demos, arms over legs, field data as moat
Industry splits into two camps: robots can do everything vs. robots are overrated; reality is in between.
Capabilities advancing fast, but reliability gap remains: research targets 30→80% success rates; industrial use demands 99–99.9%.
A 70% success-rate robot is a terrible teammate; the field is behind on reliability.
Best training data comes from real deployments; Standard Bots’ hundreds of fielded robots generate a unique data flywheel.
Data collection device “Echo”: handheld gripper with camera matching the robot’s wrist camera perspective, eliminating domain gap; iterated for months to go from 20-minute ergonomic limit to full-day usability.
“Show Path” demonstration: users physically guide the robot through a task; it learns the vision routine and end-to-end policy quickly.
Humanoid strategy: deliberately not pursuing legged humanoids. “Home Alone eval” — a humanoid must survive 5–8 year olds trying to trip it on stairs; if a couple hundred pounds of metal falls, it breaks bones. Legged humanoids aren’t ready for homes or factories.
Focus on arms + wheeled bases: reliability, safety, and immediate utility in structured environments.
Business philosophy: profit from production, not pain
Incumbents profit from customer pain: rigid interfaces, expensive service contracts, integrator lock-in.
Standard Bots’ rule: “We will not profit off our customers’ pain.” Profit comes from their production — when customers succeed, they buy more.
Goal: expand human capacity, not replace humans. Welders manage six welding robots instead of breathing weld smoke — higher pay, safer, more productive.
Historical lens: Industrial Revolution automated textiles but left hand-weavers behind because they couldn’t operate the new machines. Standard Bots designs for ordinary workers so no one is left behind.
Robots are “R2-D2” — power tools for the 21st century, making humans more capable.
Beard sets seemingly impossible weekly deadlines; team says it can’t be done; ~80% of the time it gets done anyway.
Example: nine weeks after a key hire joined, Beard demanded a live on-stage demo at Automate trade show; whole team said terrible idea; they pulled all-nighters; it landed.
Beard lived in the factory for months fixing challenges; demonstrated that full focus + belief compresses timelines.
Philosophy: if you think something takes X time, it takes at least X; set tight timelines, break down or simplify the problem until it fits.
Team describes a culture where “no” isn’t an option because the founder often shows the path to the impossible.
The odds and the mission
Ten years in, odds of building the world’s biggest robotics company were always long — “like becoming an NBA player.”
De-risked significantly: Fortune 500 deployments, hundreds of use cases, nationwide footprint, growing 5–10x yearly, on track for 10% of new U.S. deployments by end of next year.
Ambition remains an Apple/Nvidia-scale platform company; odds still long, but improving daily.
Beard’s framing: short time on Earth; highest use is giving back; his unique gift is making robots.
