Neurala Honored as Top Robotics Company in Massachusetts

The “automation innovation” that defined last year’s list of the Largest Robotics Companies in Massachusetts continues to dominate, with nine new companies on our list and hundreds more employees. While the 19 firms on the 2017 list represented a cumulative total of 2,486 employees in the Bay State, this year the BBJ list has grown to a traditional top 25 with a total of 3,109 local staff. Of the 16 firms that have appeared on the two most-recent versions of this list, 13 reported year-over-year gains in their local head count. In several cases, these gains were significant: No. 18-ranked Neurala grew by approximately 117 percent.

Confirming her firm’s growth, a spokesperson for Neurala attributed it to “the $14 million Series A round we raised in January 2017. Since then, we have moved into a new office and hired on several new employees, and still growing.”

The new participants grace this year’s list offer evidence that this subsector of the local tech industry is both growing and diverse. That type of innovation has fueled an increasingly robust robotics cluster with broad applications — including autonomous vehicle companies and drone companies, said MassTLC Robotics Cluster Manager Joyce Sidopoulos. “Massachusetts is the leader in collaborative robotics, ground mobile and e-commerce logistics, and unmanned under/surface vehicles,” Sidopoulos said.

Her sentiments were echoed by Tom Ryden, executive director at MassRobotics, which describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit organization serving as the innovation hub for robotics and connected devices.” Noting that at his organization’s co-working facility alone there are more than two dozen startups that didn’t exist two years ago, he attributed the industry’s local growth to “the reduction of the barriers in starting a robotics company through more powerful and lower cost components, the ability to leveraging existing code and established robotic operating systems, and from the support of an improving ecosystem.”

To see the original version of this article, please visit the Boston Business Journal.