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Building Almond
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Shawn Patel shared thistl;dr: PCBs have atopile and tscircuit; harnesses had nothing. We built an open-source, AI-native wire harness designer that works with Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. Live at harness.almond.bot. Building Axol means building a lot of wire harnesses — FAKRA GMSL camera lines, CAN, power, all internally routed through two 7-DOF arms. And every time we needed one built, the bottleneck wasn't the design. It was hours going back and forth with our harness supplier to get all the small details right — pinouts, wire gauges, lengths, labels — and then doing it all over again for every revision. Meanwhile, PCBs got their code revolution — atopile and tscircuit let you define boards as code, and AI agents can now design electronics end to end. Harnesses had nothing like that. So we built it ourselves. How it works: 🔌 Harness as code. Every harness is a JSON file. Real version control: diff revisions, review changes in PRs, branch a variant, and always know exactly what the shop built. 🤖 Built for AI agents. It ships as a skill for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. Tell your agent "design a 6-pin pigtail from a Molex Micro-Fit to flying leads, 18 AWG" and it authors the file, validates it, and exports the drawing. 👀 Live viewer. The drawing updates in real time as you (or your agent) edit the file. No export-open-squint loop. 📦 Real parts, not placeholders. Components reference actual LCSC, Mouser, and Digi-Key part numbers, with distributor data pulled in automatically — the BOM is quotable the moment the design is done. 📄 Manufacturer-ready output. One command exports a clean PDF drawing with every detail your harness shop needs — no more back-and-forth over pinouts and wire gauges. We now use it for every harness inside Axol. What used to take an afternoon takes minutes. And like the rest of our stack, it's fully open source: https://lnkd.in/gV2QadQc Try it: harness.almond.bot If you've ever lost a week to a harness drawing that didn't match the connector on your bench, I'd love your feedback. 👇 #robotics #hardware #wireharness #AI #opensource #electronics #manufacturing #buildinpublic
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Shawn Patel reposted thisShawn Patel reposted thisStill on the fence about July 9th? Here's why you shouldn't be. 5 pitches. 2 live robot demos. 🎤 Pitches: Ashutosh Saxena — TorqueAGI Ken Miller — Stakabl Guillaume Binet — Copper Robotics Inc. Afik Cohen — Houmanoids Michel Valstar — Blueskeye Plus: two companies bringing their robots into the room to demo live. Almond Robotics and OpenMind Robotics moves fast. The people building it move faster. July 9th is where you catch up. Save your spot 👇 https://luma.com/npo44l8f #Robotics #HumanoidRobotics #BayArea #BARA #DeepTech
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Shawn Patel reposted thisShawn Patel reposted thisAnnouncing Axol, a dual-arm robot designed for teams working with physical AI. A year ago, we were in grocery stores and factories trying to get robots to do actual work. And they kept breaking. Data collection was just too difficult. Reach and payload were limited. Singularities reduced our workspace. Cables failed, but support was slow. Most robots we used were built for demos, not real environments. So we built our own. ➡️ Watch the launch video: https://lnkd.in/giYn_W4H ➡️ Learn more: https://www.almond.bot/ Axol is for the teams turning physical AI into reality. For builders who believe robots should work, in the real world, not just staged environments, and that the future of physical AI should be open, not closed. Axol is available today: - Axol (standalone robot) - Axol Kit (robot + cameras + compute to start training on day 0) We assemble every unit in San Francisco, CA — so we can be there for you when it matters. If you’re working on physical AI, Axol is for you. And we’re not just building Axol, we’re building the factory that fuels the robotic future of America.
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Shawn Patel reposted thisShawn Patel reposted thisAlmond Robotics just shipped Axol, and it is aimed squarely at the part of manufacturing automation that traditional robot arms have never served well. ☛ Two independent 7-DOF arms, 860mm reach each ☛ Full 180° pitch and yaw at the wrist, which cuts the shoulder singularities that shrink a robot's usable workspace ☛ Fully internal cable routing, nothing exposed to snag or wear ☛ 6.5kg peak payload per arm, with an open-source Python SDK, bimanual IK, and VR teleoperation built in Almond was founded by Saba Khalilnaji and Shawn Patel and is part of Y Combinator. Every Axol is designed and assembled in their San Francisco workshop. Classic industrial arms were built for high-volume, low-mix lines following the same patterns, welding the same seam, placing the same part a million times. The factory work that never got automated is the opposite, low-volume and high-mix, where the task changes constantly and reprogramming a rigid arm for each one costs more than the labor it replaces. A dual-arm platform that learns from teleoperation and ships with an open software stack is a bet that this long tail of manual work is finally addressable. The open question is durability in a real plant. A clean demo on a bench is a long way from a robot earning its keep on a noisy floor for a year. Worth watching who deploys it first. AUTONOMOUS is the premier physical AI & robotics event coming to San Francisco, July 16th. Built for founders, VCs, engineers and researchers to come together in a dedicated room. Early Bird tickets are available → autonomousfuture.co #PhysicalAI #manufacturing #robotics #AIevent #AUTONOMOUS
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Shawn Patel reposted thisOur portfolio company Almond Robotics just launched Axol, a robot designed for real-world tasks using AI 🚀 You can learn more below and at almond.bot 🤖Shawn Patel reposted thisAnnouncing Axol, a dual-arm robot designed for teams working with physical AI. A year ago, we were in grocery stores and factories trying to get robots to do actual work. And they kept breaking. Data collection was just too difficult. Reach and payload were limited. Singularities reduced our workspace. Cables failed, but support was slow. Most robots we used were built for demos, not real environments. So we built our own. ➡️ Watch the launch video: https://lnkd.in/giYn_W4H ➡️ Learn more: https://www.almond.bot/ Axol is for the teams turning physical AI into reality. For builders who believe robots should work, in the real world, not just staged environments — and that the future of physical AI should be open, not closed. Axol is available today: - Axol (standalone robot) - Axol Kit (robot + cameras + compute to start training on day 0) We assemble every unit in San Francisco, CA — so we can be there for you when it matters. If you’re working on physical AI, Axol is for you. And we’re not just building Axol, we’re building the factory that fuels the robotic future of America. #robotics #automation #ai #hardware #startups #reindustrialize
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Shawn Patel shared thisMeet Axol, a dual-arm robot built for work not just demos. Made in America. A year ago, we were in grocery stores and factories trying to get robots to do actual work. And they kept breaking. Data collection was painful. Reach and payload were limited. Motion constraints and singularities killed usable workspace. Cables and components failed. Support was slow. Most robots we used were built for demos, not real environments. So we built our own. ➡️ Watch the launch video: https://lnkd.in/ggbvd-3j ➡️ Learn more: https://www.almond.bot/ Axol is for the teams turning physical AI into reality. For builders who believe robots should work, in the real world, not just staged environments — and that the future of physical AI should be open not closed. Axol is available today as: • Axol — standalone robot • Axol Kit — robot + cameras + compute to start training on day 0 We assemble every unit in San Francisco, CA — so we can be there for you when it matters. If you’re working on physical AI, Axol is for you. And we’re not just building Axol, we’re building the factory that fuels the robotic future of America. #robotics #automation #ai #hardware #startups #reindustrialize #physicalai
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Shawn Patel shared thisWe love working with the Twolabs (YC P26) team! Tobi + Axol make the best duo 🤖Shawn Patel shared thisEpisode 1: Sardor’s Birthday 🎂 To build robots that can naturally live around people, we have to test them in real human moments. So for Episode 1, we recorded Tobi celebrating Sardor Rahmatulloev’s birthday: lighting a candle, serving it, and interacting in a social setting. This demo combines HRI-trained datasets with early testing of our fine-tuned models for natural human-robot interaction. Big shoutout to Almond Robotics for the robot embodiment.
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Shawn Patel liked thisShawn Patel liked thisWire harnesses are the nervous system behind aerospace, defense, and many of the most important products built today. Yet they have remained one of the most overlooked categories in manufacturing for decades. Today we are announcing Senra Systems's $65 million Series B and plans to accelerate our expansion with a third manufacturing facility. This brings our total funding raised to over $112 million. We believe one of manufacturing’s biggest challenges has been misunderstood. The problem is not that skilled workers do not exist. The problem is that too many critical industries still rely on fragmented systems, manual workflows, and institutional knowledge that is difficult to scale. We started Senra to change that. At Senra, we are building a different model. One that combines skilled manufacturing, software, automation, and operational systems to help scale some of the most critical work in the industrial base. Earlier this year, we opened Factory 2 in Cypress, CA, expanding our manufacturing footprint by 5x. This funding allows us to continue scaling that model and investing in the systems that make modern manufacturing possible. Our plans for Factory 3 represent the next chapter in that mission. Grateful to our team, customers, and investors who believe in what we are building. https://lnkd.in/gbJsdBkm
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Shawn Patel liked thisShawn Patel liked thisProvenMetal (YC S26) is manufacturing the fastest circuit boards in the US. Critical hardware companies like drone manufacturers wait weeks for circuit boards. That time is lost to quoting, design review, part procurement, and assembly— bottlenecks ProvenMetal is automating. 1. Send ProvenMetal your design files 2. Get instant quoting and rapid design review 3. They source every component 4. They assemble in San Francisco and X-ray every board 5. Delivered in days instead of weeks CTO Will Carkner, is an electrical engineer, who shipped the PCB testing pipeline at Lumindt. CEO Johnny Doyle is a mechanical and manufacturing engineer who previously built IoT building management systems. They've lived this problem, and know exactly how to fix it. Congrats to the team on the launch! 🚀 https://lnkd.in/ghxxByEa
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Shawn Patel liked thisShawn Patel liked thisToday, evaluating a robot policy means humans have to watch the robot roll out, mark success, and reset the scene– for thousands of episodes a week. Instance (YC S26) is automating this, starting with the success detector. Their detector takes a task description and camera footage, and returns a success verdict with detailed subtask breakdown. On 10,000+ human-labeled episodes across 8 benchmarks and 7 robot platforms, it outperforms frontier VLMs in both accuracy and latency. Instance is built by Claire Mao and Lucy Cai, MIT computer scientists and friends since middle school, with backgrounds in robotics research and software engineering at NASA JPL, SpaceX, and AWS. Congrats on the launch, Claire and Lucy! 🚀 https://lnkd.in/gnCjzNXM
Experience
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Education
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University of California, Berkeley
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Regents' and Chancellor's Scholar
Berkeley Formula Racing Electrical Lead -
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Courses
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Data Structures
CS 61B
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Designing Information Devices and Systems I
EECS 16A
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Designing Information Devices and Systems II
EECS 16B
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Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory
CS 70
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Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems
CS 170
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Great Ideas In Computer Architecture (Machine Structures)
CS 61C
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Integrated-Circuit Devices
EE 130
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Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
CS 188
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Introduction to Digital Design and Integrated Circuits
EECS 151
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The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
CS 61A
Honors & Awards
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Google Super G
Google
Exceptional leadership & contribution towards Pixel phone development.
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Taco Bell Foundation Live Más Scholar
Taco Bell Foundation
Scholarship awarded to "the next generation of innovators, creators and dreamers who want to make a difference in the world."
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Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 Scholarship
Apple
"[WWDC] Scholarships reward talented students and STEM organization members with the opportunity to attend [the annual developers] conference." Submitted Vysual Assyst as my interactive Swift Playground.
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Eagle Scout
Boy Scouts of America
The highest rank awarded by the BSA.
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Simon Lancaster 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇵🇹
Nvidia, Foxconn reported to be in talks to deploy humanoid robots at Houston AI server making plan - https://lnkd.in/gYvJ-fWd These type of mid-market Humanoids Could Be Korea/Japan/Taiwan’s Moment: • China may be poised to dominate in consumer robotics but… • Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are ideally positioned to ship secure, reliable, mid-priced robotics and humanoids for more stringent applications • Cheaper than U.S. systems, safer than PRC supply chains: ideal for enterprise and government buyers Why this matters now: • Trusted supply chains + infosec baselines → KTJ ecosystems already meet industrial cybersecurity norms • Industrial-grade mechatronics + serviceability → legacy robotics and component expertise translate into uptime • Cost discipline without cutting safety → focus on modularity and repairability, not disposable hardware Recent catalysts: • Korea launched a national K-Humanoid Alliance to drive global leadership by 2030 • Taiwan’s robotics suppliers are emerging as preferred subsystem and sensor partners for U.S. and EU OEMs • Japanese firms are pivoting humanoid R&D into applied enterprise robotics: logistics, inspection, healthcare For manufacturing-tech investors: The humanoid shift isn’t about billion-dollar prototypes: it’s about scalable, serviceable, and secure humanoids built on KTJ’s manufacturing DNA. This is the mid-market inflection where enterprise robotics meets trusted industrial supply chains.
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