For this edition, #152 of The Robot Industry Podcast, I welcome Caleb Appleton from Bison Ventures.

Bison Ventures is a Venture Capital (VC) firm with $135M AUM for frontier tech. From AI-powered drug discovery to collaborative robotics, Bison backs bold, deeply scientific solutions that have potential for massive commercial scale. An all-engineer team, Bison believes most attractive opportunities exist at the intersection of technical disciplines ignored by mainstream VC. 

Partner Caleb Appleton specializes in physical applications of AI. He’s an early investor in Cobot, a collaborative robotics co. En route to unicorn status following its $100M Series B Previously, Caleb was an investor at Innovation Endeavors, where he focused on frontier robotics (including surgical robotics, $RBOT), applied AI, and next-gen hardware.

My questions for Caleb:

What is series A, B and C?

What is a round?

How do you value a robot company?

How do you fund them?

Where do you get money to manage these companies?

How did you get into the business of robotics and AI?

What is your approach to investing in this sector? 

What’s unique about the Bison team, and how you partner with robotics founders?

You are after the big successes for your investments and time. What does that look like?

What are red flags for you when it comes to investment?

What themes in automation/robotics are you most excited to back right now—and why? It seems much attention is going towards humanoids, but what are your thoughts on this trend vs other paths to pursue?

Robotics is hard because it is both hardware, software, AI and marketing and the long lead time to development. Could you have picked an easier sector? How do you compress this time cycle?

What are the core values and value proposition to being successful in this sector, how do you coach entrepreneurs to not aim for the moon?

What does a de-risked deployment path look like for an early robotics team? What makes a robotics company scalable or suitable for commercialization?

Did we forget to talk about anything?

When you are not helping build robot and AI companies what do you like to do, hobbies?

How can people get a hold of you and find out more about Bison & Caleb Appleton?

Thanks for listening and subscribing and Happy New Year!

I would like to mention A3: the Association for Advancing Automation. they are the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies.  Visit Automate dot org to learn more.

If you would like to get in touch with us at THE robot industry podcast, you can find me, Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimberetta/

Today’s podcast was produced by Customer Attraction Industrial Marketing and I would like to thank my team: Chris Gray for the music, Geoffrey Bremner for audio production, my business partner Janet and our sponsor: Mecademic Industrial Robots ~ world leading manufacturers of compact and precise industrial robots. 

Warm Regards and success for 2026!

Jim

Jim Beretta

Customer Attraction & The Robot Industry Podcast

London, ON