Founders

Automatika was founded in France, as a spin-off from Inria, the premier national research lab for computer science and applied mathematics. Automatika is the result of the founders’ prior research (past 10 years) in robotics, control theory, physically accurate simulation and machine learning. Our core mission is to create the software infrastructure that empowers intelligent physical agents to operate seamlessly in the real world. We are currently located at the CEA campus in Grenoble, other than being surrounded by one of the biggest deeptech research infrastructures in France, it also houses some of the most important French startups in sensing technologies, materials science and quantum computing.

Maria Kabtoul

Maria’s work is centered on the fundamental challenge of robotic “presence”, how a machine moves through a human-centric world without being a nuisance or a hazard. During her time as a researcher at Inria, she pioneered motion control strategies designed specifically for dynamic, unpredictable environments. Her research resulted in state-of-the-art methods for proactive decision-making and control, allowing robots to move cooperatively alongside humans rather than simply treating them as static obstacles to be avoided.

During her work she had first-hand experience with the industry’s legacy software limitations. While working extensively with nav2, the most widely adopted open-source navigation framework, she recognized that the framework was limited by its design choices both in terms of control options and rigid behavior trees, and was fundamentally mismatched for the era of general-purpose robotics. For a robot to transition from a single-task tool to an easily reprogrammable multi-purpose agent, it requires a navigation stack that is as fluid and adaptive as the AI models driving its comprehension.

This experience later turned into Kompass and became an impetus for founding Automatika. She holds a doctorate in Robotics and Computer Science from Inria, France, and an MS in Control Theory from University Grenoble Alpes.

Haroon Rasheed

Haroon’s expertise lies at the intersection of applied mathematics and “Physically Grounded” AI. During his time as a researcher at Inria, he specialized in solving inverse problems in soft matter physics. This work involved the development of machine learning models trained with physically accurate simulators, specifically designed to survive the “sim-to-real” transition when tested on real-world video data. He also worked on developing GPGPU kernels for speeding up physics simulations.

For Haroon, founding Automatika was a natural progression from modeling complex physical systems to solving the ultimate “hard problem”: the orchestration of general-purpose physical agents. He recognized that the primary barriers to general-purpose agents, out-of-domain generalization, data scarcity, and the fragility of sim-to-real transfer, cannot be resolved by better (general) models alone. They require a systems level approach i.e. a resilient infrastructure that seemlessly orchestrates specialized ML and deterministic control components in a dynamic graph and treats environmental stimuli as real-time feedback for its adaptivity.

Before returning to deep-tech research, Haroon worked as a technology consultant, where he led large-scale engagements and managed geographically dispersed teams. He holds a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Inria, France, and an MS in Data Science from ENS-IMAG, Grenoble.