Why We at NextView Invested in Walden Robotics
I have backed Dave Johnson before. At NextView, we were early investors in his last company, Dexai Robotics, which built kitchen robots for restaurants before he successfully sold it in 2024. Dave is exactly the kind of founder we love to back more than once: technical, relentless, and someone who has already carried a hard robotics company all the way to an exit. So when he shared a few months ago what he was doing next, I assumed he would be running his own company again.
Instead, he was joining a founding team as Chief Product Officer. After selling a company to Sony, Dave could write his own ticket. When a founder of that caliber chooses to go build inside someone else’s company, the team he is joining has to be world class.
That world class team is Walden Robotics.
Dave subsequently introduced me to Walden’s co-founder and CEO, Russ Tedrake, a name anyone in robotics already knows. Russ is the Toyota Professor at MIT across three departments, where his underactuated robotics course has taught roboticists around the world. He also created Drake, the widely used open-source robotics framework. Lex Fridman put it simply when he hosted Russ on his podcast: “a great teacher and a great person, one of my favorites at MIT.”
For the past several years Russ led robotics research at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), most recently as Senior Vice President of Large Behavior Models. Large Behavior Models (LBMs) are to robots what large language models are to text: instead of being programmed by hand, the robot learns new physical skills from human demonstration. His team’s published LBM 1.0 research trained models on nearly 1,700 hours of robot data and showed that pretrained models pick up new tasks with three to five times less data in challenging settings. In a collaboration with Boston Dynamics, the same approach drove the Atlas humanoid through long, multi-step manipulation jobs, recovering from dropped parts without a single line of new code.
Walden is spinning that work out of TRI and into the world, with a founding team of robotics and AI pioneers drawn from TRI, MIT, Stanford, and Amazon. My partner, Lee, and I spent meaningful time with Russ at Walden’s Cambridge headquarters and watched the robots at work. Seeing it in person is what turned our interest into real conviction.
The company’s robots are already doing real work alongside people at one of the world’s largest manufacturing plants… and they got there in under two months, going from first pilot to full deployment. The robots keep humans in the loop, asking for help when they need it and improving as they work. A production line punishes even small failures; for a company this young, earning a place on that floor says as much about the team’s discipline as it does about the technology.
Walden launches today with a $300M seed round at a $1.1B valuation, co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital, with strategic partners including NVIDIA and Samsung. For us the round also came with a familiar face: Deviation’s Colin Beirne, a longtime collaborator of ours from his Two Sigma Ventures days, where we were co-investors together in WHOOP. Because of our conviction about the company, NextView leaned in with a meaningful check.
The opportunity ahead of Walden is enormous. The past few years of AI have been about knowledge work. The next few will be about the physical world, which is where most of humanity’s labor still happens. Robots that learn new tasks from human demonstration can move from one production line to the broader economy faster than any robotics wave before them. Walden now has the capital to match the team’s caliber, and we could not be more excited to be part of what Russ, Dave, and everyone at the company are building.
