Diligent Robotics is beefing up its leadership to scale its hospital and pharmacy robots. The Austin startup just hired two execs from the shuttered Cruise self-driving car company.
Rashed Haq joins as CTO. He was VP and Head of AI and Robotics at Cruise. Todd Brugger is COO, formerly Cruise’s COO. Both bring deep experience in AI and autonomous operations.
CEO Andrea Thomaz said the timing is right. Diligent has deployed about 100 Moxi humanoid robots that handle non-patient tasks in healthcare. Now they want to grow fast. 
“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.”
Haq impressed Thomaz with his ability to turn AI ideas into working real-world tech – not just lab experiments. Brugger’s track record scaling Cruise’s fleet from zero to hundreds of cars also made him a perfect fit.
“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.”
Both new hires told TechCrunch Diligent is a natural next step. Their past work on Cruise’s autonomous vehicles lines up closely with Diligent’s mobile hospital robots.
“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.”
Brugger said operational priorities at Diligent feel very familiar. He broke it down as safety first, then reliability, then product-market fit, often expanded by adding robot capabilities.
“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.”
Founded in 2017 by Thomaz and Vivian Chu, Diligent’s Moxi bots are now in over 25 healthcare networks. The startup has raised $90M+ from Tiger Global, True Ventures, Canaan Partners, and others.
This leadership boost signals Diligent is doubling down to scale its robotic healthcare helpers fast.
