Founder & CEO | Robotics (HealthCare)

Founders Factory • New York, NY

2d • $6,675 - $6,675 • Onsite

About The Position

Founders Factory builds and funds startups together with exceptional entrepreneurs and the world's leading companies. Created by IPO-exited founders, we offer founders capital, operational support from a team of hands-on experts, and unrivalled access to a coalition of industry-leading corporate partners. Since 2015, Founders Factory's 450+ portfolio companies have secured 500+ pilots and commercial contracts with our partners. Our Studio partners with entrepreneurs at day one, developing new ideas, technologies and business models into high-growth companies. In partnership with a leading global industrial technology partner, we are building a new portfolio of ventures.

About the Venture
America's ~1,900 continuing-care retirement communities (CCRCs) are the only elder-care buyers whose model rewards keeping residents healthier for longer: residents join at 75–80, pay a large entry fee (avg. ~$402k) plus $12–30k a month, and the community carries the lifetime cost of care. These campuses staff their night shifts at roughly twice the regulatory minimum — comfort-driven cover that can't simply be cut — and once holidays, sickness and cover are loaded, each night position carries ~$160k of true annual cost. Worse, the status quo causes the harm it exists to prevent: around 80% of falls happen in the window right after a nurse's check wakes the resident. Existing tech — pull cords, wearables, fixed sensors — is safety kit that never changes the staffing model.

We are building NightWatch: a mobile UWB-radar robot that patrols the corridor at night, senses through doors and walls, and reports movement as fact — in bed, out of bed, in the bathroom, on the floor — never as clinical judgement. Data is monitored remotely, and staff are alerted only when a physical check is warranted. No cameras. No wearables. No per-room installation. Sold as robot-as-a-service, it delivers a two-to-three-month payback and is the easiest pilot in the category to say yes to: zero capex, zero installation, nothing entering residents' rooms, and fully reversible.

The unfair advantage: our partner brings a production robotics stack already live in market with a paying customer — autonomous navigation, docking and fleet software — plus radar and UWB signal-processing IP already built, manufacturing scale to drive unit cost down, and edge compute that lifts the all-important robots-to-operator ratio. The sensing IP and the ROI model are the moat.

Requirements

• Founder or senior operator who has built a hardware / robotics or hardware-as-a-service product from zero to one, ideally in the US market.
• Deep familiarity with at least one buyer segment: US senior living / CCRC operators, eldercare, or enterprise facilities operations.
• Enterprise commercial instinct: you can navigate multi-site operator sales cycles and turn a pilot into a fleet rollout.
• Strong product and technical instincts: you can reason about robotics, sensing, edge compute and unit economics even if you are not building the robot yourself.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity: shaping the product, defining the buyer, and making irreversible calls with incomplete data.
• Credibility with conservative care operators and forward-looking venture investors, and willingness to be on the ground in the US.
• Motivated by category creation — building the operational backbone for how America ages, on robots you put there first.

Nice To Haves

• We are not looking for a traditional senior-living executive or a pure robotics researcher. The ideal candidate sits at the intersection.

Responsibilities

• Define the wedge. Choose the operator profile and the 3-state cluster (consistent regulation) where you run concurrent pilots first.
• Turn a thesis into a product. Work with our partner's robotics teams to take the night-patrol robot and its remote-monitoring layer from concept to a fleet operators can run.
• Win the first pilots. Land 2–3 CCRC / senior-living operators and prove FTE substitution through the pilot sequence — service level held with one less night headcount.
• Sell savings, not safety. Frame the buy as an ROI decision for the CFO/COO, positioned as redeployment, not redundancy.
• Drive the economics. Push the robots-to-operator ratio toward the levels that make margins trend to software, working with our partner on a path to lower unit cost.
• Build the company. Hire the initial team, raise capital, and establish the venture as the automation layer for senior living.

Benefits

• $128k ring-fenced build budget to cover founder stipends and additional specialist resource at the founders' discretion
• Founder stipends are $6,675 per founder per month, drawn from this budget
• Embedded studio team throughout: a full time venture builder, with support from a broader team consisting of a studio lead and growth marketer. Founders build; the Studio supports.
• On-demand access to specialist support across data science, applied AI, fundraising, legal, finance, PR and commercial partnerships
• Dedicated network access from day one
• At incorporation, the founding team will receive 70% equity in a new company set up for the venture, and the Studio 15%, both subscribed at nominal value. The remaining 15% is reserved as an employee option pool.
• $320k cash investment goes directly into the new venture's bank account at IC approval - full founder discretion over how funds are deployed
• Accelerator support: a dedicated squad covering growth, product and fundraising, plus continued access to shared services

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed