By Aaron Pressman Globe Staff, August 15, 2022
When Mick Mountz decided to start a robotics company, the MIT grad was living in Palo Alto, Calif., and planning to stay put.
It was just after the dot-com boom had gone bust. Mountz had run warehouses for a failed e-commerce company, WebVan. His next idea was to design machines that could speed up the process of collecting all the items needed for warehouse orders.
But everyone he wanted to hire, it seemed, was in Massachusetts, home to a collection of university robotics labs, defense contractors, and a few pioneering companies such as iRobot and Boston Dynamics (both started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers). Fund-raising also was a challenge.
Source: Boston Globe