ROBO Global

ROBO Glob­al was cre­at­ed to give investors a front-row seat to the robot­ics rev­o­lu­tion. I part­nered with indus­try and finance lead­ers to build the world’s first robot­ics and automa­tion ETF — a frame­work that helped bring the sec­tor into the mainstream.

ROBO Glob­al began in 2013, when I joined forces with Rob Wil­son, Frank Tobe, and Rand Wrighton to cre­ate the world’s first robot­ics and automa­tion exchange-trad­ed fund. They had sought me out not long after Ama­zon acquired Kiva Sys­tems, the robot­ics and logis­tics com­pa­ny I co-found­ed, know­ing that I brought both a deep tech­ni­cal under­stand­ing of robot­ics and first­hand expe­ri­ence in build­ing a com­pa­ny that had suc­cess­ful­ly com­mer­cial­ized it at scale. For them, the link was obvi­ous: if robot­ics was going to reshape indus­tries, then some­one who had helped make that hap­pen from the inside could help ensure the fund cap­tured the right com­pa­nies and tech­nolo­gies from the start.

Frank Tobe—founder and pub­lish­er of The Robot Report, a robot­ics-focused news and research plat­form he launched in 2008—brought unmatched indus­try insight and a deep net­work in the robot­ics com­mu­ni­ty. Rob Wil­son, founder and CEO of Shave Log­ic, con­tributed strate­gic and entre­pre­neur­ial expe­ri­ence in brand build­ing and oper­a­tions. Rand Wrighton, then man­ag­ing direc­tor at Bar­row, Han­ley, Mewhin­ney & Strauss, added insti­tu­tion­al invest­ment exper­tise and a dis­ci­plined approach to index con­struc­tion. Togeth­er, we com­bined tech­ni­cal, indus­try, and finan­cial per­spec­tives into a shared vision: to cre­ate an investable win­dow into the entire robot­ics and automa­tion ecosystem.

My role was to help shape the intel­lec­tu­al and tech­ni­cal foun­da­tions of that vision. We defined what “counts” as a robot­ics or automa­tion com­pa­ny, devel­oped a clas­si­fi­ca­tion frame­work that went beyond the obvi­ous indus­tri­al names, and built a set of rules for select­ing, weight­ing, and rebal­anc­ing hold­ings that could adapt to a fast-chang­ing indus­try. The goal was to cap­ture the full stack of capabilities—not just com­pa­nies mak­ing robots, but also those pro­vid­ing the sens­ing, actu­a­tion, com­put­ing, and soft­ware that make intel­li­gent automa­tion pos­si­ble. We thought of the index as a liv­ing sys­tem, designed to evolve as tech­nolo­gies advanced, mar­kets shift­ed, and new lead­ers emerged.

In the ear­ly years, we were evan­ge­lists for a theme few investors had con­sid­ered. In 2013, a “robot­ics ETF” sound­ed spec­u­la­tive, even exot­ic. We spent count­less hours with advi­sors, port­fo­lio man­agers, and the media show­ing that this was not sci­ence fiction—it was a fast-grow­ing eco­nom­ic force already trans­form­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing, logis­tics, health­care, agri­cul­ture, and more. The idea res­onat­ed. By the end of 2017, the U.S.-listed ROBO ETF had sur­passed $2 bil­lion in assets under man­age­ment, a clear sig­nal that the cat­e­go­ry had entered the main­stream. Along the way, we marked our grow­ing recog­ni­tion with two stock-exchange mile­stones: ring­ing the Nas­daq open­ing bell in 2017 and the New York Stock Exchange clos­ing bell in 2018.

Over time, the orig­i­nal robot­ics and automa­tion index was joined by THNQ (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence) and HTEC (health­care tech­nol­o­gy), form­ing a fam­i­ly of the­mat­ic bench­marks tracked by asset man­agers and research groups around the world. In April 2023, VettaFi acquired the ROBO Glob­al index suite, bring­ing it into a larg­er ana­lyt­ics and dis­tri­b­u­tion plat­form and set­ting the stage for fur­ther growth. Lat­er that year, VettaFi itself was acquired by TMX Group—the oper­a­tor of the Toron­to Stock Exchange—in a trans­ac­tion that val­ued the com­pa­ny at over US $1 billion.

Look­ing back, the most sat­is­fy­ing part isn’t just the scale we achieved, but how close­ly we stayed aligned to the orig­i­nal vision. Our clas­si­fi­ca­tion frame­works, selec­tion cri­te­ria, and ecosys­tem approach became part of how the mar­ket talks about and invests in robot­ics today. In much the same way my ear­li­er work at Kiva was about build­ing adap­tive sys­tems that could scale and evolve, ROBO Glob­al was about cre­at­ing an invest­ment struc­ture capa­ble of keep­ing pace with a rapid­ly advanc­ing field. More than a decade on, it con­tin­ues to do just that—offering investors a front-row seat to one of the most pro­found tech­no­log­i­cal shifts of our time.