There were 475 people at CoRL 2026 saying publicly that they want to meet. This guide puts all of them in one place.
We read every public post we could find from CoRL week on X and LinkedIn, looking for those actively want to connect with others. We kept only people who said, in their own words, that they’re open to a DM, a coffee or a hello. They range from first-year PhD students to founders and VPs of top AI startups and big tech companies.
The guide has four parts:
Who is investing: 6 investors in Austin this week.
Who is hiring: 44 companies are hiring, and you could find out who to ask and where to find them here.
Who wants to meet: A list of people actively asking for DMs or coffee chat, and we curate the list grouped by role.
Come say hi: Many people welcome visitors at their poster, talk or booth, and you could get more information before really meeting them offline.
Missing someone, or want your entry changed? Reply to our post and we’ll update the guide.
Who is investing
Six investors posted that they’re in Austin and open to meeting founders and researchers, and two of them are hosting their own events.
Isha Mehrotra: Investor at Uncork Capital. She wants to talk about World models, sim2real, HW–SW co-design, dexterous manipulation. Reach her via DM, and her Physical AI x Data mixer, which is on Wed 11/11, 6 - 7:30 PM.
Vivek Sodera: Founder of Supercharge VC (pre-seed), Superhuman. He Wants to talk about deployment, data, sim, models, safety and manufacturing. Reach him via DM.
Amulya Vishwanath: Founder of Techable VC. She wants to talk with Robotics founders, investors and operators. Reach her via her side event on Saturday.
Taejoon Park: VP, Head of Investments at LG Technology Ventures. He wants to talk about Robotics broadly. Reach him via DM on LinkedIn.
Siddharth Gupta: Managing Director at Samsung Ventures. He wants to talk with Robotics researchers and founders. Reach him via DM on LinkedIn.
Wilson Lin: Investor at DCG. He wants to talk about Robot learning, data, simulation, safety, research-to-product. Reach him via DM on LinkedIn.
Who is hiring
44 teams and labs said they’re hiring this week. Big tech and autonomy teams are mostly at booths, and startups prefer DMs.
Big tech, autonomy and research labs
Amazon (FAR & Robotics): Full-time researchers and PhD interns, whole-body control and loco-manipulation, full-time and interns. Ask Yunsheng Tian, Shamel Fahmi, Ifrah Idrees at Booth 606.
Apple: Robotics research scientists, ML and AI engineers, research engineers, postdocs, full-time and interns. Ask Somrita Banerjee, Nagarakshith Makam Sreenivasulu, Chen Chen, Matthias Mueller, Siyuan Hu at Booth 806.
Tesla: Policy, world models, pre-training, on-robot inference. Ask Shashank Sangar at Booth 1006.
General Motors: Research and technology careers in robotics and AV. Ask Randy Visser, Alex Garza, Katherine Johnson at Booth 406.
Nuro: ML research, behavior, perception. Ask Kai-Chieh Hsu, Vincent Bui via DM.
Waymo: PhD research intern, summer 2027. Ask Letian Chen via DM.
Zipline: Hiring across the board. Ask Rohit Sant at Booth 706.
Toyota Research Institute: World Foundation Models research interns, summer 2027. Ask Swati Gupta at Booth 506 (recruiting team on site).
Honda Research Institute USA: Winter/spring 2027 interns focusing on learning-based motion planning, end-to-end AD. Ask Avinash Singh via DM.
Intuitive Surgical: Full-time research scientists/engineers and research interns (motion AI). Ask Govinda Payyavula via DM.
Robotics and physical AI companies
Apptronik: Multiple roles. Ask Matt B., Nate Kurtz, Aileen Aguilar Edwards, Skye Windsor, Kathryn Marinaro at Booth 800.
Skild AI: Open roles. Ask Poorvi Hebbar via DM.
Applied Intuition: Full-time and intern roles. Ask Prithwish Dan via DM.
Rhoda AI: Open roles. Ask Changan Chen via Coffee Chat on Tue/Wed.
Eka Robotics: RL, sim2real, manipulation. Ask Pratik Kunapuli, Pulkit Agrawal and submit application form.
Humanoid: VLA/RL. Ask Jarad Cannon in person.
1X: model and data, data infrastructure and more. Ask Libing Zeng via DM.
Walden Robotics: Open roles. Ask Ashneel S. at Booth 104.
FieldAI: 100+ open roles, 20 at the FieldAI Research Institute. Ask Patrick H. via DM.
Bedrock Robotics: Hiring across the board. Ask Joshua Manela, Kevin Peterson via DM.
Holiday Robotics: Internships and full-time. Ask Hojoon Lee at Booth 504 and hiring session on Tue 5:15 PM.
Booster Robotics: Open roles. Ask Rico at Booth 101.
Xynova: Overseas sales, technical support, engineers. Ask their team via walk-in session in Room 209.
Sharpa: On-site recruitment session and at Booth 400.
Dream Labs: Open roles, including interns. Ask Jeremy Collins via DM.
Machenta: Open roles. Ask Ed Johns in Exhibition area.
Ixian Robotics: ML, software, hardware in SF. Ask Jacob Zietek via DM or email.
Verne Robotics: Scientists and engineers. Ask Neil Nie via DM for coffee.
Orbifold AI: Research and engineering. Ask Stephanie Shi via DM.
Gritt AI: Construction robotics roles. Ask Vishal Dugar via DM.
Artificial Analysis: Robotics team. Ask Peiyi Chen via DM.
OrphLux: GTM, BD, project management, solution engineering. Ask Selina B. via DM.
AIM Intelligence: Robot engineers (physical AI safety). Ask Dasol Choi via DM.
Persona AI: Humanoid roles. Ask Andrew Almasi via DM for coffee.
RAI Institute: May hire interns soon. Ask Thomas Weng via DM.
Prometheus: Open roles. Ask Oier Mees.
Academic labs
TU Darmstadt: 2 postdocs: learning for control; structured learning and world models. Ask Georgia Chalvatzaki in person.
Mila / Université de Montréal: Postdocs and students. Ask Glen Berseth via DM.
Georgia Tech: 1 PhD + 1 postdoc, fall 2027. Ask Harish Ravichandar in person.
Georgia Tech: PhD students and postdocs: humanoid loco-manipulation, deformable and dexterous manipulation. Ask Lu Gan.
UT Dallas (TERAS Lab): PhD and Master’s students. Ask Neel P. Bhatt.
Northeastern: Interns, PhD students, postdocs. Ask Taskin Padir in person.
University of New Hampshire: PhD students: failure modes and safety of imitation learning. Ask Momotaz Begum in person or via message.
Who wants to meet
324 people asked for DMs, coffee or a meetup in their own posts. Below are a few featured names from academia and top companies. The full list with links to their posts is in this curated sheet. You could check the full list here.
Academia
Marco Pavone: Associate Professor at Stanford, where he directs the Autonomous Systems Lab, and Director of Autonomous Systems and Physical AI Research at NVIDIA. He is known for Trajectron++ trajectory forecasting, and he is a PECASE recipient who previously worked as a roboticist at NASA JPL.
Jeannette Bohg: Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford and director of the Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab, the lab behind TidyBot and TidyBot++. She has won the 2019 ICRA Best Paper Award, the IEEE RAS Early Career Award, the RSS Early Career Award and a 2023 Sloan Fellowship.
Pulkit Agrawal: Associate Professor at MIT EECS, director of the Improbable AI Lab at CSAIL, and co-founder of Eka Robotics. Eka recently raised a $150M Series A for force-aware Vision-Force-Action models and is hiring. He received the 2024 IEEE Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation.
Danfei Xu: Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, where he directs the Robot Learning and Reasoning Lab, and a research lead at NVIDIA GEAR. He is senior author of EgoMimic, built with Meta’s Project Aria glasses, which found that an extra hour of human hand data beats an extra hour of robot data.
Georgia Chalvatzaki: Program Chair of CoRL 2026 and head of the PEARL Lab at TU Darmstadt. She holds an ERC Starting Grant and a DFG Emmy Noether grant, is an ELLIS Scholar, and won the Alfried Krupp Prize. She is hiring 2 postdocs.
Siddharth Karamcheti: Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and Autonomy Research Lead at Walden Robotics. He is co-first author of OpenVLA, a 7B open-source VLA trained on 970K real-world robot demos. He was previously at Hugging Face, Toyota Research Institute and Facebook AI Research.
Jiafei Duan: NUS Presidential Young Professor leading the MAGIC Lab, who co-led the open-source robotics foundation models MolmoAct and MolmoAct2 at UW and Ai2. At CoRL 2026, the work has a Spotlight for MolmoAct2 and an Oral for MolmoBot, which shows embodied reasoning on a $6K robot.
Founders & Execs from Big Tech and Top AI Startups
Changan Chen: Rhoda AI($450M Series A), World Models.
Jarad Cannon: Humanoid($152M Series A), Humanoids, VLA/Foundation Models, RL
Maoqing Yao: AGIBOT (Co-founder & President)
Soha Pouya: NVIDIA(Sr. Director, Robotics), Humanoids, Sim/Sim2Real
Amit Goel: NVIDIA (Head of Robotics Ecosystem), Sim/Sim2Real, Evaluation
Nima Gard: Director of AI at Path Robotics($100M Series D), RL, VLA/Foundation Models, Deployment
Kevin Peterson: CTO at Bedrock Robotics ($600M Series C), Deployment
Jacob Zietek: Ixian Robotics (a16z, Accel), Deployment
Jason Ma: Cofounder at Dyna Robotics($120M Series A), VLA/Foundation Models, Continual/Self-improving
This list only covers people who posted publicly on X or LinkedIn. If you’re at CoRL and want to be added, or want your entry changed, reply to our post.
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