Rudy Cohen on Giving Robots Eyes, Brains, and a Second Life in Our Factories
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In this episode, Rudy Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Inbolt, reveals how a new generation of industrial entrepreneurs is reinventing automation by upgrading the robots we already have. Born from a small team fresh out of school, shaped in Berkeley and Shenzhen, and now deployed across automotive and electronics plants worldwide, Inbolt is bringing real perception to machines that were built to operate blind.
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Rudy’s journey started early. A computer engineer with a taste for applied mathematics, he moved from numerical optimization to robotics and computer vision, eventually building the core idea behind Inbolt. If robots fail in real factories, it is not because they lack power. It is because they lack understanding. Giving them the ability to see their environment in real time became the foundation for everything that followed.

Inbolt’s mission goes beyond building new tools. It aims to unlock automation for processes that were considered impossible to automate. Traditional robotic arms require perfect conditions. Parts must always be in the exact same place. Lines must be fully constrained. Any small deviation creates downtime, and downtime kills productivity. Inbolt brings flexibility. A single camera and a lightweight vision model mounted on any industrial robot allow it to adapt to variations in position or movement. With one day of installation and a few minutes of fine tuning, robots begin to operate with the reliability of an experienced operator. This shift raises production capacity by double digits in a matter of hours.

The road was not linear. Rudy describes the difficult decision to abandon Inbolt’s first product for manual operations, despite traction and contracts, in order to focus fully on robotics. That pivot required rebuilding the technology, facing uncertainty, and convincing investors that the bigger market was the right one. The result speaks for itself. The company now installs hundreds of systems across Europe, the US, and Japan, with clients like Stellantis, GM, Toyota, and Ford. From one deployment to the next, the technology propagates across entire factories, creating a true land and expand dynamic.

For Rudy, the deep enabler behind all this is data. Inbolt’s models operate on real time factory inputs, not lab experiments. By equipping existing robots with perception, the company collects the kind of ground truth dataset that will later power more autonomous systems. It is a pragmatic approach to robotics. Not humanoids. Not science fiction. Industrial intelligence built on real constraints and real production cycles.

Rudy also shares his view on the global robotics race. While humanoid robots get headlines, he believes the real battle is for the brain that will orchestrate all machines on the factory floor, regardless of form. The winners will be those who combine software discipline with industrial integration, who understand that reliability matters more than demos, and who capture the right data at the right scale.

Conclusion

Rudy Cohen embodies this new generation of industrial builders who merge deep tech with the reality of the shop floor. Through Inbolt, he shows that the future of automation will not be defined by shiny new robots. It will be defined by smarter ones. The ones already installed in our factories, upgraded to operate faster, safer, and with a level of autonomy that finally matches the needs of modern manufacturing.

Listen to the full episode of Next Gen Industrials, the OSS Ventures podcast hosted by Jean Philippe Lorinquer, on your streaming platforms or YouTube.

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