🧭 RUMBO — ISSUE #007

Saludos! Happy Tuesday, and welcome to Rumbo, edition 007.

Florian Pestoni calls himself a "recovering engineer." He started in research labs in Argentina working on cryptography and video streaming before anyone cared about either. Then he jumped to product management at Microsoft, Facebook, and Adobe, building software used by hundreds of millions of people.

But something was missing. The cloud was scalable. The technology was mature. Everything worked seamlessly at massive scale.

Then his co-founder showed him robots struggling in the real world. Robots generating terabytes of data per hour with no way to manage them. Companies hiring entire teams just to keep their robot fleets running. The robotics industry facing the same problems cloud computing solved a decade ago.

So Florian left Silicon Valley's tech giants to build InOrbit, a platform that brings cloud-scale operations to robotics. Today, backed by Google's $150K Founders Fund, InOrbit manages robot fleets across warehouses, hospitals, farms, and factories worldwide.

So grab your cafecito and dive in. If you enjoy today's edition, please forward it to your gente or share it online. ☕

Florian Pestoni grew up in Argentina, studying electrical engineering at the University of Buenos Aires. His early research focused on obscure topics that later became mainstream: cryptography, image processing, video streaming, embedded systems. He holds over 30 patents across these fields.

"I like to describe myself as a 'recovering engineer,'" Florian says. "I started out working as an engineer doing research on topics that were obscure at the time and later became mainstream, but at some point made the switch to business and product management."

That switch brought him to Silicon Valley, where he earned his MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Then came the big leagues: product roles at Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, and other major tech companies. He helped build hyper-scale products reaching hundreds of millions of users. The cloud infrastructure was mature. Everything just worked.

But Florian's co-founder, Julian Cerruti, had spent over a decade in robotics. He kept talking about the challenges robotics companies faced. Florian listened, fascinated by how different the robotics world was from the cloud world he knew.

"Before we even started the company, we did 25 interviews with founders of robotics companies, with users, really to understand what their problems were," Florian recalls. "We landed on this idea that, when a robot goes from the lab to the real world, there's a big transition."

The problem was clear. Robots are the ultimate edge computing application, using sensors and AI to operate autonomously in unpredictable environments. A single robot generates terabytes of data per hour. A fleet of just 100 robots generates 1 exabyte of data per year (that's 1 followed by 18 zeros).

Companies had no infrastructure to manage this. They were hiring specialized engineers just to keep tabs on their robots. Basic functions that cloud developers take for granted (reliable data collection, remote monitoring, performance optimization) became massive science projects in robotics.

Florian saw the gap: robotics needed what DevOps did for cloud computing.

In 2018, Florian and Julian founded InOrbit. Their mission: bring data-driven, product-centric operations to robotics. They created a platform that manages robot fleets the way cloud platforms manage servers.

The core innovation is what InOrbit calls "adaptive diagnostics," a patented capability that dynamically adjusts data collection based on need. When robots are operating normally, InOrbit monitors lightly. When something goes wrong, it instantly scales up data collection to diagnose the issue.

This solves a fundamental problem. You can't send terabytes of data from every robot to the cloud constantly. But you also can't afford to miss critical failures. InOrbit's distributed architecture (code running in the cloud, at the edge, and inside robots) provides the infrastructure robotics companies need without drowning them in data.

For companies using ROS (Robot Operating System), connecting to InOrbit takes under a minute. Other robots can use InOrbit's SDKs. The platform works with robots from any manufacturer, deployed across any industry.

The market responded. InOrbit raised funding and began working with robotics companies deploying fleets in warehouses, hospitals, farms, hotels, and factories. Companies using InOrbit could focus on building great robots instead of building operations infrastructure from scratch.

Then in 2024, Google recognized InOrbit's potential. The company selected InOrbit for its Latino Founders Fund, providing $150,000 in non-dilutive funding plus $100,000 in Google Cloud credits and access to Google's AI and technical experts.

"We were already working on Copilot when we applied," Florian explains, referring to InOrbit's AI-powered analytics tool. "One thing that resonated is that we're using AI in a very practical and direct way. Robots can generate massive amounts of data, and we've created a novel mechanism for discovering the data and getting the right insights."

Today, InOrbit is the leader in a new category called RobOps (Robot Operations). Just as DevOps enabled cloud computing to scale, RobOps is enabling robotics to scale.

The company's vision is ambitious: help 1 million robots positively impact the lives of 1 billion people.

To support this vision, Florian co-founded the Robot Operations Group, a community of over 300 members organizing regular meetings and global conferences to develop best practices for robot operations. He also represents the United States in ISO's initiative to create common standards for mobile robot communication.

Under Florian's leadership, InOrbit created the Robot Space in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's both a live showcase of InOrbit's global partner ecosystem and a hub for industry leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and students to experience the latest robotics and AI technologies.

The company works with customers ranging from small businesses to large enterprises across virtually every industry: supply chain management, hospitality, facilities management, agriculture, healthcare. InOrbit enables orchestration of robots from multiple manufacturers, deployed at multiple sites, all managed through a single platform.

Florian also coined the term "roboteer" to describe people who support robot operations through remote monitoring and interventions. "Using products like InOrbit, you don't need to be an expert to be a robot boss. High school graduates can handle a dozen or more robots at a time with limited training. I think this is one of the coolest jobs out there to get started in robotics."

For Florian, the journey from Argentina to Silicon Valley, from cryptography research to managing products for billions of users to building robotics infrastructure, has been anything but a straight line.

"I think in the curves is where something interesting happens," he says.

He's also created his own philosophy about entrepreneurship: "The difference between tenacity and stupidity can only be determined in hindsight. After talking to hundreds of entrepreneurs, I have found that it's hard to tell which one it is when you're riding the startup rollercoaster of emotions."

But InOrbit's mission goes beyond business metrics. Florian believes people, robots, and AI working together can help humanity overcome its biggest challenges. From addressing labor shortages to solving supply chain issues to tackling environmental concerns, autonomous robots are becoming essential.

The kid from Buenos Aires who studied obscure technologies before anyone cared is now building the infrastructure that will power the next industrial revolution. From Argentina to Silicon Valley, from research labs to tech giants to robotics infrastructure, Florian Pestoni is proving that the best path forward is rarely a straight line.

And as robots enter workplaces worldwide, InOrbit will be there making sure they actually work.

Explore InOrbit: inorbit.ai
Connect with Florian:
🔗 LinkedIn: florianpestoni
📰 Forbes Tech Council: Forbes contributor page
🤖 Robot Operations Group: robops.org

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