Meet the founder betting Washington can help him build America's robotics giant

Evan Beard was having dinner with his wife and friends this summer at a Long Island country club when the Pentagon called. It was 7:30 p.m. on a Friday. Cellphones weren't allowed in the dining room, so he walked away from his pasta to answer.

The Defense Department needed to know: Could his company's robots launch drones?

"They were like, 'We want to get robots to Iran really quickly,'" Beard said. The officials wanted his advice on whether robotic arms could launch drones from autonomous boats and what such a system might look like.

Launching a drone is one of more than 300 jobs Beard's company, Standard Bots, says its robotic arm can perform. Standard Bots' robots are not being used in Iran, and the company has no contract with the Defense Department. But the Friday-evening call from the Pentagon shows how far Beard has come.

A decade ago, Beard began teaching himself how to build hardware in his cramped Manhattan apartment. Now, just shy of 40, he has a robotics startup valued at $1 billion. Its investors include RoboStrategy, General Catalyst, and Amazon. Its customers range from mom-and-pop shops to Amazon, Lockheed Martin, and NASA. Beard says two venture firms have offered to lead his next funding round (he hasn't accepted either offer).

The CEO is riding a wave of investor enthusiasm for robotics. Long wary of hardware, venture capitalists are now pouring billions into machines that can do physical work, drawn by AI's potential beyond chatbots and an intensifying technological race with China. Robotics and physical AI companies raised $33.4 billion globally in the first half of this year, surpassing the $28.7 billion raised in all of 2025 — and up from just under $5 billion in 2020.

Beard believes the next great global power contest will be fought not only with AI chips and drones, but with robots — and he says the US is already behind. He's making it his mission to persuade Washington to help American robot makers catch up.

Robot lobbyist

Beard has become a frequent visitor to Capitol Hill as Washington scrambles to counter China's head start in robotics. Last year, Chinese companies Unitree and AgiBot together shipped 71% of the world's humanoid robots, according to research firm Omdia. Most US companies rely on Chinese suppliers for components or assembly, according to Stanford's 2026 Emerging Technology Review.

In two appearances before Congress, Beard has called for federal loans to help manufacturers adopt robotics and trade barriers against state-subsidized Chinese competitors. He also lobbied for restrictions the Federal Communications Commission imposed this summer on new models of foreign-made advanced robots.

At a private meeting this summer with Beard and executives from SpaceX, Boston Dynamics and other companies, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned of an approaching robotic arms race, according to notes reviewed by Politico. "We need to make sure they're produced in America," Lutnick said.

Beard wants to make that happen, and on a grand scale. Within a decade, his goal is to build the world's largest robot manufacturer and make all its robots in the US. It's a staggering ambition for a relative newcomer to take on decades-old industry giants as well as Chinese competitors that can manufacture robots at a fraction of the cost. Other American companies, including Tesla and Agility Robotics, are building robots domestically, though both are focused on humanoids and have yet to prove they can manufacture them profitably at scale.

Beard is betting that two forces could tilt the odds in his favor: AI-assisted "vibe coding" that makes robots easier to program, and investors and the White House treating American robotics manufacturing as crucial to national security. Beard said Standard Bots, the company's name, is a nod to his ambition to one day rival Standard Oil's influence.

"We're going to have raw materials coming, and robots going out," Beard tells me during a tour of his Long Island factory. "Henry Ford-style."

The accidental roboticist

Long before Beard began building robots, he coded an app to text his girlfriend.

It was 2009, and Beard had just graduated from Duke. While he was brainstorming business ideas with a friend, his girlfriend kept calling. Those interruptions gave him the idea for Girlfriend Keeper, which automatically sent personalized messages to a partner. One example: "Hey, it's 137 days to your birthday, I'm going to get you something green like your eyes."

The app went viral. That girlfriend is now his wife, with whom he has five children.

Beard moved to San Francisco and joined Y Combinator in 2010 to build his first startup, which Salesforce acquired. By 2014, he'd sold another company to telecommunications firm Spirent. Beard then moved to Los Angeles to launch his third company with actor and investor Ashton Kutcher, an early backer of Beard's first startup.

Kutcher told Business Insider they had to pivot the business several times before settling on A Plus, a media company focused on positive journalism. "Evan's speed to act is very quick," Kutcher said. "He takes the medicine and moves on."

All the while, Beard became increasingly obsessed with robots. At Y Combinator, he had watched accelerator cofounder Trevor Blackwell build humanoid robots in its machine shop. "It was the first time I realized that it was possible to craft in the physical world," Beard said.

On nights and weekends, he read textbooks and tinkered with hardware, convinced that robots would become the next major computing platform after mainframes and smartphones. "What I saw 10 years ago was, the window's gonna open to create a generational company, and you could create the biggest robotic company in the world," Beard said.

After selling a majority stake in the company he co-founded with Kutcher, Beard turned to robotics. To figure out what to build, he hired a freelancer in the Philippines for $7 an hour to arrange calls with prospective customers. Soon, he was talking to dozens of businesses a week about the robots they used and what they wished those machines could do.

Over the next several years, Beard pursued what he calls a "self-taught Ph.D." in robotics. He and his two cofounders — childhood friend James Cordle and entrepreneur David Golden — endured "lots of dark nights of the soul," he said. For months, their motor controller, which controls the electronics that move a robot's joints smoothly, kept exploding. Then, just as they were ready to build their first prototype, the makerspace they planned to use shut down. The founders took out an eight-year loan to buy a CNC mill, a machine that cuts material into precise shapes.

By 2024, Standard Bots had just three customers and was running out of money. Beard said more than 70 investors turned him down before he found a backer in Lachy Groom, an early Stripe employee who cofounded robotics lab Physical Intelligence.

Groom, a prolific angel investor who rarely backs robotics companies, said that he decided to invest within five minutes of speaking with Beard.

"My impression of Evan was, 'Holy shit, this is one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life," Groom said. "His ability to go from the 30,000-foot view to, like, the three-micron view is remarkable. And he's an absolute maniac. I've never met anyone who works harder."

The cost of building in America

Standard Bots' factory is in Glen Cove, a small city on Long Island's North Shore. On the drive there in October, I passed oyster shacks and golf courses lined with trees beginning to turn orange. It was a striking contrast to what I'd learned while reporting on China's robotics industry, where manufacturers and their suppliers cluster in blocks near one another, forming mini-cities dedicated to pumping out robots.

The factory occupies the back of a building. When I visited, I entered a cavernous warehouse lined with metal racks holding hundreds of robot parts. Workers wearing safety glasses sat at desks, assembling components from manuals as if building Lego. Toward the back, a hulking machine inspected hundreds of chips for defects before they went into the robots. Construction is underway to expand the production floor toward the road, with a robot showroom at the front.

"This will look like a hybrid of an Apple and Dyson store," Beard said.

Standard Bots' business began to take off last year, Beard said, though he wouldn't disclose how many customers the company has, its annual revenue, or production numbers. He expects to be producing 4,000 robots a year by the end of 2027 — equivalent to roughly 10% of annual US industrial robot installations. He puts the factory's annual capacity at 20,000 robot arms but wouldn't say when the company expects to reach that level.

Beard's established rivals have a considerable head start. Japan-based FANUC shipped its one-millionth industrial robot in 2023, while Denmark-based Universal Robots says it has sold more than 100,000 cobots worldwide. Both have spent years building their sales pipelines and service operations.

Beard isn't too worried. "They're nothingburgers," he said. "They're shipping so few robots, and their software is not very good."

George Chowdhury, a robotics analyst at ABI Research, disagrees. "FANUC is very highly regarded, as is Universal Robots," he said. "To break into those markets is going to be really hard. They're going to have to beat them on cost and performance."

Beard says that he won't have to win many customers from established robot makers. Instead, he wants to sell to manufacturers that have never used robots. Robot arms have long excelled at precise, repetitive movements, but teaching them a new task often requires specialist programming. Beard wants workers to do it themselves, using AI.

The incumbents are working to make their robots easier to program too. FANUC has demonstrated a system that turns spoken instructions into robot code, while Universal Robots and Switzerland-based ABB have introduced tools to simplify programming.

Standard Bots' midsize arm starts at $39,500, compared with over $50,000 for a similarly sized model from Universal Robots. Chinese suppliers sell arms at considerably lower prices, leaving Beard to convince customers that his machines are worth the higher price.

Michelle Sun, a robotics analyst and author of the Substack Core Matter, sees a path for Standard Bots if the government helps create early demand and the company can use AI to manufacture more efficiently than its rivals.

"We can't brute force our way to manufacturing in the US," Sun said. "The way to unlock it is to figure out how to leapfrog other countries using AI."

Beard said Standard Bots does not yet use many of its own robots on its production line, but plans to as it scales. It also remains dependent on global suppliers. The company designs almost every major component at its Long Island factory, but sources only about 40% of its parts domestically by value. Critical components still come from China and elsewhere because American alternatives can be three to ten times more expensive, Beard said.

Learning the ways of Washington

On the day I visited Standard Bots, the company was hosting an event about bringing manufacturing back to Long Island with Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat who represents parts of Long Island and Queens. An American flag hung above a makeshift stage as local government and university officials mingled over bagels and coffee.

A clean-shaven Beard greeted me in a gray suit, a Standard Bots logo in the colors of the US flag pinned to his lapel. He loomed over an impeccably dressed older woman beside him. She wore leather pants, and her red nails matched her red shoes.

"This is Shelley, my performance coach," he said, introducing me to the actor Shelley Mitchell (when Mitchell isn't coaching Beard, she told me she works with actors on the latest season of The White Lotus).

When Beard took the stage, I sat beside Mitchell in the front row. She gave him thumbs-ups and waved her hands to remind him to slow down and relax.

Beard describes himself as "autistic and very awkward." He began working with Mitchell during his time with Kutcher to become a better communicator and recruiter. People who have known him for years say he has gone from struggling to make eye contact to speaking with charisma and authority. Now, he is putting those skills to work in Washington.

Last year, VC firm General Catalyst introduced him to Washington through its policy arm, the General Catalyst Institute. Congressional staffers he met invited him to address about 40 aides over lunch.

"I always thought the government was a one-way speaker, and you couldn't actually input anything," Beard said. "The moment I realized we need to engage was when a 34-year-old was asking me what the government should do and if I can help with a plan."

He has since testified before Congress twice and become a frequent visitor to the White House, calling for low-cost loans, incentives to adopt robots and federal purchase guarantees for American-made robotics hardware. He also wants restrictions on Chinese-made robots in sensitive facilities.

Beard's Washington outreach might pay off. The Defense Department's Office of Strategic Capital, which helps finance new factories and production, is negotiating a potential multi-billion-dollar loan for Standard Bots, according to two people familiar with the matter. The department did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

As Beard showed me around the factory, he said he had never considered himself political or expected building a robotics company to take him to D.C. every few weeks. But he seemed to be enjoying his growing influence in Washington and sees his cause as existential for the US. He has invested in well-fitting suits and excitedly recounted meeting defense secretary Pete Hegseth the previous week.

"Robotics is going to strike at some of the country's biggest problems," Beard said. "If you can align what you're working on with what the country needs and what the customer needs, that's special."

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