Ashish Kumar, the engineer who led artificial intelligence for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid, is building a new robotics team, and this time he has chosen a non-humanoid path.
According to Sina Finance on 7 October, Kumar’s co-founded startup Intelligent Machines is based in San Francisco and has already recruited several former members of the Optimus team. It is advancing a seed round that could reach roughly USD 100 million, targeting manufacturing and aerospace, where robots would take over work now done by highly skilled technicians.
Kumar left Tesla in September 2025 and joined Meta as a research scientist before the startup reports surfaced. At Tesla he ran the Optimus AI team, not the whole robot programme. His departure should not be read as a clash with Musk; public records show no proof of a technical falling out or a coordinated exit by former colleagues.
His research explains the non-humanoid bet. As a Berkeley doctoral researcher, Kumar worked on rapid motor adaptation, training control policies in simulation and deploying them on real quadrupeds so robots cope with unseen terrain. That line of work is about robot learning, not a fixed shape. Intelligent Machines is reported to focus on robot software, with management also debating in-house hardware, and uses reinforcement learning to train complex tasks.
The pivot mirrors a wider pattern. Chris Walti, an early Tesla Bot leader, founded Mytra in 2022 around material flow and storage, raising a USD 120 million Series C in January 2026. Both show ex-Tesla talent taking robot capability into narrower, paid industrial jobs rather than a general humanoid.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original 36Kr report. The full source is at https://36kr.com/p/4016917482166148 (36Kr). It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.