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There is a moment that Florian Pestoni Haas MBA ’01 has watched play out too many times to count. A brilliant founder, years of work, hardware that does exactly what it was designed to do. The demo is perfect. And then the robot leaves the building.
“You hit a wall,” Pestoni said. “The physical world is really messy. You can’t just hope that you build the perfect robot, send it out, and hope for the best.”
Who checks on the robot? Who knows if it’s stuck, drained, off-course, or just quietly failing in a back corridor somewhere? In short, Pestoni wants to know: is the robot happy?
InOrbit is his answer.
Berkeley Pushed Him to Think Bigger
Pestoni grew up in Argentina and spent his early career doing engineering work in software and systems that, as he put it, was sometimes hard to explain to people who weren’t already inside the field. He wanted to think at a different scale. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business felt like an almost irresistible draw.
“It brings the academic rigor, it has the connections with the Valley, but it’s also the culture,” he said. “It pushed me to think about problems at a different level.” He came away with a filter he still uses today. Before taking on any opportunity, he asks himself a simple question: Am I creating genuine value? Something I’d be proud to be part of?
“Our time here isn’t that long,” he added. “I want to work on things that matter.”
After Haas, his career took him through Facebook, Microsoft, and Adobe, building products at a scale most founders never touch. What those years gave him wasn’t just product instinct. It was a lesson about data. When you have hundreds of millions of users, you need data to manage them. You can’t watch each one. You build systems that watch for you. He carried that lesson directly into InOrbit.
A Hotel, a Hospital, an Airport Walk into a Platform
A cleaning robot at a hotel starts its shift. Before it moves, InOrbit has already checked sensor data, booking systems, and the log from the night before. There was a conference in the ballroom. The robot goes there first.
The same platform, same underlying logic, runs at airports, hospitals, e-commerce warehouses, and farms. The environments look nothing alike. The robots are made by different manufacturers. But Pestoni describes three data domains that every deployment has in common: where things are in space, what state each robot is in, and what work needs to get done. InOrbit sits at the intersection of all three, translating business intent into robot behavior in real time.
“A facility manager might need one robot doing security patrols, another vacuuming, a different one mopping,” Pestoni said. “A lot of companies underestimate the complexity of coordinating all of that work.”
The complaint he hears most often is that robots are coming for the people who do this work. He pushes back. “People are awesome. We are flexible, adaptable. Most robots are really far from that.” What robots can absorb are the tasks that grind people down physically. For example, in the United States, there is a shortage of 100,000 trained forklift operators. Self-driving forklifts, he said, are basically indoor Waymos. That’s not displacement. That’s a gap being filled.
The Sustainability Angle Nobody Talks About
Pestoni points out that robots can help companies be more sustainable. “Robots are data machines,” he said. “They’re collecting massive amounts of data, and then using that data to make decisions. That allows you to be much more precise.”
Instead of cleaning every section of an airport the same way every day, a robot running on InOrbit can pull foot traffic data and the previous day’s water quality readings to decide where to focus and how much detergent to use. In agriculture, that same logic drives targeted weed control and irrigation. In a restaurant, sensors can weigh every dish that comes back from the table to track food waste down to the gram.
The resource savings are not a side effect of automation. They are what good data makes possible.
Naming the Category, Then Building the Community
A few years in, Pestoni became convinced the industry needed more than a product. It needed a shared language. So he co-founded the Robot Operations Group, now with more than 300 members, to build the same thing for robotics: a body of best practices, hard-won lessons, and a vocabulary that scales.
He is also representing the United States in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) initiative to create a universal communication standard for mobile robots. The goal is simple to describe and hard to achieve: connect to a robot you have never seen before and have it work instantly. “Reducing friction, reducing lock-in,” he said, “grows the pie for everyone.”
His advice to students and young founders building at the intersection of hardware and the real world comes down to three things: go after the hardest problems because they are where real-world impact is possible; take the operational layer seriously because a great demo is not a business; and invest in community because it gives back as much as you put in.
He closed the conversation the way a lot of Cal conversations end. “Go Bears!”
This feature is part of a sponsored content series produced by the Cal Alumni Association in partnership with BradyPLUS, a leader in cleaning, foodservice, and packaging solutions.
