Cambridge Semantics’ Brian D. Owen Joins RightHand Robotics as CEO

RightHand Robotics has appointed Brian D. Owen as its new CEO. Owen previously served as the CEO and president of Cambridge Semantics, a data management and enterprise analytics company.

While Yaro Tenzer is stepping down as CEO, he will remain at the company as chairman and work on go-to-market strategies and business development.

“For eight years, the team and I built, hardened, and scaled our product, improving the technology every year, deploying the robots across the U.S., Europe, and Japan and continuing to grow our customer base,” Tenzer said in a statement.

“Now is the time to build on these foundations by accelerating the scaling of customers and deployments. I’m very proud of this company and I look forward to working with Brian in my new role as chairman.” Tenzer added.

RightHand touted Owen’s thirty years of experience in finance, technology, and commercial deployments. It added that Owen will be charged with helping the company scale up.

Owen has decades of experience in technology

Under Owen’s leadership at Cambridge Semantics, bookings grew 300 percent to $24 million, according to RightHand. He also has served in leadership roles at White Cup, SunGard, ORACLE Corp., and MapInfo, and Computer Associates.

“I am thrilled to be joining RightHand Robotics as the next CEO and incredibly proud for the opportunity to build on eight years of progress that the team has accomplished,” said Owen in a statement. “The company’s piece-picking technology is in high demand in the market and I look forward to working with this amazing team to continue that momentum to grow the company worldwide.

“I’ve led six companies through various stages of growth and execution and have the scar tissue resulting from the many successes and lessons experienced along the way,” he said. “I plan to apply that knowledge to this role and carry on the company’s mission and vision of ‘owning the pick in the supply chain so humans don’t have to.’”

In February 2022, the company announced it has raised $66 million in Series C financing.

Since then, it said it has hit some major milestones. The company has launched its Partner Integrator program, resulting in recent collaborations with leading players like Vanderlande and AutoStore™ integrator Asetec. RightHand Robotics also solidified its automated piece-picking leadership in the growing online pharmacy market with a new pharma customer, Apotea.

In an interview with Modern Materials Handling, Robotics 24/7’s sister publication, Owen noted he signed on with the company because he believes it has a mature product offering that has major potential market growth.

“Every company and industry, like robotics, goes through a maturity model,” he said. “The first installations are installed and supported by engineering. In the next Rev(ision) the implementation team does the install with support from engineering. Eventually, you’re partnering with an integrator and they can do the installation and support.” That’s the point that RightHand has reached, he added. “That was a big part of my understanding of the maturity level of the company.”