When Shaun Edwards co-founded Plus One Robotics in San Antonio in 2016, venture capitalists told him to pack up the company and move it to Austin.
They warned him he couldn’t build a robotics company in San Antonio.
Instead of heading north, he set up his successful company here and founded SATX Robotix, a community of technologists working on autonomous vehicles, drones and industrial robots who meet to network and present the freshest technology in their fields.
“I decided if we build a community in San Antonio then the next time somebody brings Austin up, I can say, ‘We do have a community of roboticists in San Antonio,’” Edwards said at the group’s meeting last week. “Now there are more roboticists in San Antonio than Austin and we have a meetup that easily beats the number of people that go to meetups in Austin. Our community in San Antonio is much larger.”
It’s getting national attention.
Dozens of roboticists and enthusiasts gathered Thursday to celebrate news that San Antonio has been recognized by the U.S. Alliance of Robotics Clusters, a group of nonprofits and organizations based in Boston, Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley — the nation’s largest robotics hubs.
The alliance invited San Antonio-based robotics startups to co-exhibit at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago in September. It’s the largest manufacturing and automation show in the nation.
“We’re elevating our profile and doing something with the Big Three, which has always been the mission of our group,” said Stephanie Garcia, a business development specialist at Port San Antonio who organizes events for SATX Robotix. “This is not Austin that was invited. This was San Antonio.”
She also told the group that she’s started the state’s first chapter of the international nonprofit Women In Robotics.
Robo City USA?
“I think we can show everybody that we are Robo City USA,” she said to applause.
For years, San Antonio has been known as Military City USA. Its tech growth has sprung, in part, from military connections.
Port San Antonio’s 1,900-acre campus is home to the Air Force Medical Operations Agency and adjacent to Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, where the Air Force Civil Engineering Center and 16th Air Force, known as Air Forces Cyber, are located.
More recently, San Antonio has also been dubbed Cyber City USA. At least 16,447 cybersecurity professionals working locally for the federal government, accounting for about one-third of the city’s 48,000-plus information technology workers, according to a recent study by Tech Bloc, an industry advocacy group, and Port San Antonio.
Over the past few years, local techies have tossed around the question: Is San Antonio also Robo City USA?
As the city’s tech industry continues to expand, executives, entrepreneurs and investors are showing interest in its robotics scene. While small in comparison with local tech heavyweights in cybersecurity, for example, San Antonio has some robotics heavy hitters.
Where and who they are
The Southwest Research Institute, the research non-profit on the Northwest Side, employs about 100 electrical, mechanical and software engineers focused on the science. Among local roboticists, SwRI is known as a kind of training grounds for engineers who want to start their own robotic companies.
There also exist a plethora of robotics-interested academics at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
In the private sector, San Antonio’s strain of robots are largely grounded in business or industrial use. Not humanoids or the back-flipping canine from viral videos, these are business-to-business robots doing large-scale disinfection of buildings, unpacking pallets, sorting packages, building trucks, lasering paint off aircraft, mapping building interiors and industrial-sized lawnmowers for solar panel farms.
At its meeting last week, SATX Robotix touted one of the top players in San Antonio. Plus One Robotics, which raised $33 million in venture capital in 2021, doubled its space by 15,000 square feet at the Port San Antonio campus last year. Amid an automation boom that accelerated through the pandemic, the company has plans to expand its headquarters again while continuing to hire in Boulder and Europe, and establishing engineering, sales and support teams in the Netherlands.
“Plus One Robotics has doubled every couple of years,” Edwards said. “And there are other companies here that are in stealth mode in San Antonio that have great potential.”
Also at the meetup, Michael Blanton Jr., the CTO of Renu Robotics, said the startup founded in 2018 develops 1,100-pound autonomous electric tractors that maintain landscapes surrounding solar panel farms.
The company has grown from a handful of employees to more than 30, most of them working in San Antonio.
“We’re seeing a lot of great growth and a lot of support from the community,” Blanton said. “We are interviewing, we’re hiring, so please come see me if you’re interested in a job.”
Kris Kozak, co-founder of Hatchbed, described the recent success of the robotics research and development engineering startup.
“Since we started the company, we’ve worked in pretty much anything that could be considered to be a robot,” he said.
The company has completed projects with autonomous robots, drones and industrial manipulators — steel arms that lift, lower and transport products. It has also worked with engineering and robotics design firm Boston Dynamics on “Spot” the four-legged automated mobile robot, as well as the Cisco-powered Indy Autonomous Challenge, which fostered the first autonomous race car competition at Indianapolis Motor Speedway last year.
“We’re one of the lesser-known robotic companies here, but we’re working with companies across the country,” he said. “Our goal is to continue working with startups and small businesses, and to build a robotics community here in San Antonio.”
All three — Edwards, Blanton and Kozak — provide a window in the scenes’ interconnections: all have been SwRI engineers.
Edwards, of Plus One Robotics, considered where San Antonio might soon stand among the Big Three robotic clusters in Silicon Valley, Boston and Pittsburgh.
“San Antonio has a shot at being at their level,” he said. “In three to five years, I’d love to be a peer with them and sit on the same stage as them.”
Getting there, in part, will take better national promotion of the local robotics scene.
“But it’s not impossible,” he said. “We can build this.”
Source: https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/San-Antonio-s-growing-robotics-scene-draws-17327514.php