waveless

The problem

Factory robots are powerful, precise and remarkably hard to direct. Reprogramming a robotic cell for a new part or task can take an integrator days of work, and smaller plants rarely have automation engineers on staff. As a result, many mid-sized manufacturers buy a robot, use it for one job and leave it idle when production changes. The bottleneck is not the machine; it is the interface between people and the machine.

Why now

Manufacturers are bringing production closer to home, but they face a shortage of skilled workers and automation engineers. Robot arms have become dramatically cheaper, yet programming them has remained stubbornly complex. Advances in computer vision and speech recognition finally made it possible for a robot to understand gestures and spoken instructions reliably on a noisy factory floor. Waveless arrived at the moment when hardware was affordable, labour was scarce and the technology to make robots easy to teach had matured enough to work outside a lab.

The founders

Kenji Watanabe spent years as an automation engineer in automotive plants, programming robots line by line for every new model year. Mira Kowalski built gesture recognition systems for consumer devices and wanted to apply that work somewhere it mattered more than a game controller. They met at a manufacturing hackathon in Detroit, where their prototype let a participant teach a robot arm to sort parts using only hand movements and voice.

Why we invested

Malik backed Waveless after watching a forklift operator with no programming background teach a new pick-and-place routine in under ten minutes. The founders had built a layer that sits on top of existing industrial robots, so plants didn’t need to replace equipment they had already paid for. That compatibility mattered: it meant every robot already installed in a mid-sized factory was a potential customer. We also liked that Kenji and Mira had spent months on factory floors before writing a line of code.

How we helped

After investing, we connected Waveless with system integrators across the Midwest who now resell the product as part of their installations. Malik helped the founders define a clear safety and certification roadmap, which unlocked conversations with larger manufacturers. Our team supported them in hiring their first field engineers and building a training program so new customers could get value within the first week.

Where they are now

Waveless is now live in mid-sized plants across the Midwest and expanding into Europe. Its fastest-growing users are companies that had never automated anything before, which validates the founders’ original thesis that ease of use was the real barrier. Customers report redeploying robots between tasks several times a month rather than once a year. The team is now adding multi-robot coordination so line workers can direct entire cells, not just single arms.