Polymath Robotics launches to bring plug-and-play autonomy software to any industrial vehicle

It’s a bold declaration for a startup founder aiming to work with robots — or more accurately, the software that helps turn a tractor, tiller or forklift into an automated vehicle. But Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, who previously founded and led the now shuttered autonomous vehicle startup Starsky Robotics, is trying to make a point.

“They’re really difficult, they break all the time and getting to a stable product is really hard,” Seltz-Axmacher said in a recent interview. “Everyone kind of ends up building nearly everything from scratch, for nearly every application.”

To make matters more complex, robots used in warehouses, mining, agriculture and other industrial environments have hyper-specific applications that are structured and are often repeated thousands of times. In other words, the farmer in Iowa, the yard truck operator in Florida and the e-commerce giant with 100 warehouses spread throughout the country have specific needs that no one else does.

That’s where Seltz-Axmacher, co-founder Ilia Baranov and their new startup Polymath Robotics hope to come in. The pair have developed a plug-and-play software platform and an accompanying SDK that allows companies to quickly and cost efficiently automate industrial vehicles. Think of it as SaaS for industrial robotics.

Polymath Robotics, which came out of stealth Friday and is a Y Combinator Summer 2022 cohort, aims to become the Oracle of the robotics world. The startup is building basic generalizable autonomy designed to automate the 50 million or so industrial vehicles that are operating in closed environments today.