The ETH PhD who turned Research into a $16m Robotics Startup - Elvis Nava, Co-Founder & CTO of Mimic Robotics
Description
Elvis Nava is a researcher-turned-founder building Mimic Robotics, a company developing general-purpose robot hands powered by imitation learning. After completing his PhD at ETH Zurich, Elvis realized the only way to scale his research was by turning it into a company. Today, Mimic is pioneering a new kind of robotics—flexible, AI-native, and already proving itself in real-world industrial use cases.
In this episode we talk about:
• Why some research only works outside the lab
• How to build hardware that adapts—rather than hard-codes—the task
• What it takes to raise a $16M seed round in Europe
• How hackathons and ecosystem building accelerate deeptech
A conversation about research taste, the myth of perfection, and what happens when you build both the model and the machine.
For more behind-the-scenes from Elvis - including takeaways on fundraising and team-building - subscribe to our newsletter at followthegradient.io.
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