China's Beating the U.S. in Robotics. He Has a Plan to Catch Up.
Standard Bots CEO Evan Beard on training robots like humans, and why it’s key to rebuilding American manufacturing
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This is an AI-assisted summary of my Fortt Knox Update with Standard Bots CEO Evan Beard. View the full interview here:
Evan Beard frames Standard Bots as a response to a national competitiveness problem: the U.S. cannot rebuild its manufacturing base without dramatically increasing robotic automation. While China deploys roughly ten times as many robots as the U.S., Beard argues the real issue isn’t robot count, it’s capability.
Today’s industrial robots are hard to program and limited in what they can automate, leaving most factory tasks untouched. Standard Bots’ breakthrough is training robots through human demonstration, through VR headsets or handheld devices, rather than brittle point-by-point programming. This approach allows robots to generalize across tasks and object variations, unlocking far higher automation rates.
Beard positions this moment as a rare reset point: “physical AI” can leapfrog older paradigms just as software did decades ago. Standard Bots designs its own actuators, motors, firmware, and interfaces, mostly manufactured in the U.S.. This allows the company to lower costs, simplify deployment and scale automation across factories and warehouses. Standard Bots has raised roughly $77M and is now pushing toward broader deployment and clearer output metrics.
Today’s Toughest Problem
The core problem Standard Bots is tackling is that modern industrial robots are too limited and too difficult to use to meaningfully impact U.S. manufacturing competitiveness. Even common automation tasks like welding have surprisingly low penetration rates, because programming robots requires specialized expertise and rigid setups. As a result, factories still rely heavily on human labor for repetitive, dangerous, or dirty work that should be automatable.
Beard argues that this constraint has real geopolitical consequences. Chinese manufacturers can quote parts at six to ten times lower cost, largely because they deploy far more robots and extract more productivity from them. Without a step-change in automation, the U.S. will continue importing goods, exporting value, and losing industrial capacity. Standard Bots’ answer is a new training paradigm that lets robots learn the way humans do, by being shown. That dramatically expands the range of tasks they can perform.
Origin Story
Beard’s path to robotics began with software. Growing up in Annapolis, Maryland, he was drawn to building things early: first websites, then businesses. He studied computer science at Duke, paid his way through college by building and optimizing websites, and later co-founded a startup that went through Y Combinator and was acquired by Salesforce as a talent deal. That experience gave him both confidence and credibility. But it was exposure to robotics at Y Combinator, watching engineers solder boards and build humanoids, that reframed his ambition.
Inspired by mentors who were largely self-taught, Beard realized robotics wasn’t an unreachable domain. He began teaching himself mechanical and electrical engineering and, crucially, talking to manufacturers. After 100 customer conversations, a pattern emerged: robots were too hard to program and too limited. Standard Bots was founded to solve exactly that.
Death Valley
The company’s lowest point came from an early, risky conviction: to make robots affordable and capable enough, Standard Bots had to build them from scratch. That meant designing custom motors, actuators, and firmware. It also meant the work produced no revenue and few visible wins for years. Progress was slow, estimates slipped. Skepticism mounted. Friends staged an intervention. Venture investors warned against hardware altogether. Even Beard’s wife joked about him as an “artist in a garage,” endlessly tinkering.
What sustained Beard was learning to measure progress differently. Instead of external metrics like customers or revenue, he focused on internal input metrics: torque ripple improving, motor speed increasing, control algorithms advancing. Month-by-month technical gains convinced him the thesis was sound. The experience taught him to trust disciplined perseverance instead of blind stubbornness. And it taught him to distinguish between being early and being wrong.
Core Belief
Beard’s core belief is that the hardest problems require earned perseverance. Not every struggle is worth pushing through. But when three conditions are met: a massive opportunity, the right team, and measurable technical progress? Entrepreneurs must commit with near-superhuman persistence. In robotics, that means accepting long timelines, ambiguous feedback, and skepticism from people who focus only on surface-level outputs.
He also believes simplicity is the true unlock for automation. Most industrial robots fail not because of physics, but because of interfaces that are too opaque, rigid, and intimidating. By making robots intuitive to train and deploy, Standard Bots lowers the cognitive barrier to automation. That shift, Beard argues, is as important as any single technical advance.
Strategic Imperative
In 2026, Standard Bots’ mandate is clear: prove at scale that AI-trained robots can transform manufacturing economics. Beard wants the company to be recognized as the world’s leading deployer of AI-powered industrial robots, with undeniable output metrics to match the vision. With an annualized run rate approaching $24M, the focus now is less on explaining the future and more on demonstrating it.
Strategically, this means expanding deployments, tightening execution, and making it impossible to dismiss the idea that an American robotics company can compete globally. For Beard, success would validate a broader thesis: that the U.S. can regain manufacturing leadership by pairing physical AI with thoughtful system design rather than chase humanoid spectacle. The goal isn’t just robots in factories. It’s a renewed industrial foundation.
If you’d like to join me – and peers – for deeper conversations on innovation and leadership, get on this list for Fortt Knox Executive Communities, launching soon: mba.fortt.com.