Tesla’s former Optimus AI lead bets on robots that don’t look like people

The man who ran AI for Tesla’s humanoid robot has decided robots don’t need to look human after all. Ashish Kumar, formerly the AI lead on Tesla’s Optimus program, has co-founded Intelligent Machines. The San Francisco startup builds non-humanoid industrial robots for specialized manufacturing and aerospace work. A different shape, a different strategy Kumar spent roughly a year as Optimus AI lead before leaving Tesla in September 2025. His résumé also includes a brief tenure at Meta. Now he is pursuing the opposite of a general-purpose humanoid. Intelligent Machines designs robots for narrow, demanding jobs. These are tasks that usually fall to highly skilled human workers. The technical engine behind the startup is reinforcement learning. That is a training method where a robot improves through trial and error, earning feedback when it gets a task right. Kumar brings academic experience in the field from UC Berkeley, and the company is leaning on it to teach machines complex physical actions. The startup is in the process of raising a seed round that could reach around $100 million. That would be an unusually large opening check for a company at this stage. Intelligent Machines h...