In this episode, I talk with Nicolas Rabault, former CTO and Co-Founder of Pollen Robotics, recently acquired by Hugging Face:
Nicolas had a rocky start. He struggled in school and took an unconventional path into engineering, driven by a deep obsession with hacking, building, and making things move.
He shares the story behind Pollen: how a small research team in Bordeaux built one of the most beloved open-source robotics platforms, and why openness and modularity were at the core of their vision.
After Pollen, Nicolas founded Luos, an open-source framework that makes hardware as agile as software. Though technically powerful, Luos struggled to find a business model, and we explore what he learned from that experience, and why he's now working on a stealth-mode startup building an AI-driven industrial robot ecosystem.
This conversation is packed with insight for founders, engineers, and anyone who cares about open systems, deep tech, and what it takes to build (and rebuild) in robotics.
