Diligent Robotics is bulking up its leadership team as the company looks to scale its fleet of humanoid robots that work in hospitals and pharmacies.
Austin, Texas-based Diligent announced Thursday it appointed Rashed Haq as its chief technology officer and Todd Brugger as its chief operating officer. Both Haq and Brugger were most recently at Cruise, the GM self-driving subsidiary that shuttered earlier this year.
Haq was formerly the vice president and head of AI and robotics. Brugger was Cruise’s COO.
Andrea Thomaz, the co-founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics, told TechCrunch it was the right time for the company to make these leadership hires. The startup has deployed about 100 of its Moxi humanoid robots, which assist healthcare facilities with non-patient facing tasks, and is now ready to focus on scale.
“We’ve purposely grown a little bit more slowly, I would say, over the last, two or three years, really honing some of the operational efficiencies and getting ready to be in a position to scale more dramatically,” Thomaz said. “And that’s kind of what we’re gearing up to do the end of this year and next year.”
Thomaz said she got introduced to Haq first and liked his deep AI expertise and experience getting novel AI algorithms to work in real life, through Cruise’s autonomous cars, as opposed to just the lab.
While having early conversations with Haq, she was introduced to Brugger through a mutual connection. She felt Brugger’s experience scaling Cruise from zero vehicles on the road to hundreds seemed like the right fit for what Diligent needed.
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“Todd and Rashed worked so well together at Cruise,” Thomaz said. “Everything started coming together. We were in need of operational leadership. We knew that we were needing to hire someone with Todd’s expertise, and it was really very m …