Diligent Robotics hires two notable Cruise alumni to its leadership team

Diligent Robotics is bulking up its leadership team as the company looks to scale its fleet of humanoid robots that work in hospitals and pharmacies.

Austin, Texas-based Diligent announced Thursday it appointed Rashed Haq as its chief technology officer and Todd Brugger as its chief operating officer. Both Haq and Brugger were most recently at Cruise, the GM self-driving subsidiary that shuttered earlier this year.

Haq was formerly the vice president and head of AI and robotics. Brugger was Cruise’s COO.

Andrea Thomaz, the co-founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics, told TechCrunch it was the right time for the company to make these leadership hires. The startup has deployed about 100 of its Moxi humanoid robots, which assist healthcare facilities with non-patient facing tasks, and is now ready to focus on scale.

“We’ve purposely grown a little bit more slowly, I would say, over the last, two or three years, really honing some of the operational efficiencies and getting ready to be in a position to scale more dramatically,” Thomaz said. “And that’s kind of what we’re gearing up to do the end of this year and next year.”

Thomaz said she got introduced to Haq first and liked his deep AI expertise and experience getting novel AI algorithms to work in real life, through Cruise’s autonomous cars, as opposed to just the lab.

While having early conversations with Haq, she was introduced to Brugger through a mutual connection. She felt Brugger’s experience scaling Cruise from zero vehicles on the road to hundreds seemed like the right fit for what Diligent needed.

“Todd and Rashed worked so well together at Cruise,” Thomaz said. “Everything started coming together. We were in need of operational leadership. We knew that we were needing to hire someone with Todd’s expertise, and it was really very much perfect timing.”

Haq and Brugger both told TechCrunch that Diligent was a natural next step for them. The robotics company has already reached the deployment stage and the technology was very similar to what they were working on at Cruise. Haq added that autonomous vehicles are fundamentally mobile robots just called a different name.

“Many companies have early traction in terms of revenue and I call it ‘vibe revenue,’ because people try it out, and then they cancel their service afterwards, so then that revenue dies out,” Haq said. “But with Diligent, if you look at all the metrics, the robots are actually in day-to-day use, and have become integral parts of the companies that are using them. So that makes it a very sticky product as well. So, you know, lots of interesting things about the company.”

Brugger said that he was also drawn to Diligent because it had a lot of the same operational challenges and priorities as Cruise.

“There’s a sort of a hierarchy, or pyramid, of priorities that we looked at that I think will be very similar,” Brugger said. “You start with safety at the bottom of the pyramid, that’s a nonnegotiable. Then you move up and improve reliability. Beyond that, you continue to work on product-market-fit, which a lot of times, is expanding the capability or the utility of the robots. So I think that sort of pyramid is the same. And then the way you think about deployments, I think the parallels are very similar as well.”

Diligent was founded in 2017 by Thomaz and Vivian Chu. The company’s Moxi robots are deployed in more than 25 healthcare networks. Diligent has raised more than $90 million in venture funding from firms including, Tiger Global, True Ventures and Canaan Partners, among others.