It’s a time of transition for Anybots, the 11-year-old Silicon Valley company which makes remote-controlled robots that are meant to serve as “mobile telepresence systems.”
Trevor Blackwell, who served as Anybots’ CEO since he founded the company way back in May 2001 and is also a partner at famed startup incubator Y Combinator, has been replaced in the CEO role by former Cisco executive David Rogan, the company has announced.
In an interview this week, Rogan told me that Blackwell will “continue to be involved with the business” in some capacity, but declined to provide further details. We’ve emailed Blackwell for comment on the leadership change, and will report back with any additional information we receive.
As Anybots’ new CEO, Rogan said he is currently entirely focused on the company’s future — which is why he declined to provide details such as its current staff headcount, or the size of the recent venture capital round he said Anybots has raised.
“We’re in the process of building — and rebuilding — the team a little bit, so it’s not fair for me to put out numbers right now,” he said. “But I can say I am very pleased with some of the new investors that have come in recently, we’re starting to build a board slate, and there are some key positions from a tech perspective we’re going to bring in.”
“We’re in a rebuild mode here,” Rogan continued. “It’s a bit of trying to change the wings on an airplane while we’re flying. It’s going to be a very exciting time.”
Anybots’ technology has not yet hit the mainstream, Rogan admitted, but he said that the pace of its uptake is par for the course when it comes to the adoption of new things. “It’s a new technology, and a whole new space,” he said. Going forward, he plans to place special emphasis on showing how Anybots robots can be used in a variety of different fields and business applications.
“We have to continue to listen to the customers we have, and the potential customers out there, who are providing a significant number of different ideas about the utilization of this technology… we have to adopt different business models to apply to different potential markets,” he said. “These could work in places like an educational environment, or in a medical environment. There are a lot of different ways this robot can be used.”
Back in the day (mid-2010) TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington took an Anybot robot for a pretty amusing test drive. You can watch that video here: