# The Walden Team Learn about the Walden Way and the co-founding team. ## The Walden Way We envision a world where general-purpose robots dramatically **improve the quality of life for all people**—supporting us in factories, at work, at home, and beyond. We're building the full stack: hardware, software, frontier-class Physical AI, and the application layer, with an initial focus on production deployments in manufacturing and logistics. *[Image]* --- ## Meet the Founders ### Russ Tedrake Chief Executive Officer Dr. Russ Tedrake is Co-founder and CEO of Walden Robotics. Russ is also the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Russ has won Best Paper Awards from ICML, R:SS, ICRA, CoRL, Humanoids, CVPR, IJRR, WAFR, RAL, HSCC, ISER and the Transactions on Robotics. He is a recipient of the 2024 MIT School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award, the 2024 MIT EECS Digital Innovation Award, the 2023 MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Award, the 2021 Jamieson Teaching Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer Award for undergraduate teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in Mathematics, the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award, and was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow. Russ was formerly the Senior Vice President of Large Behavior Models at the Toyota Research Institute. He was the leader of Team MIT's entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He is well known for his leadership of the open-source robotics toolkit Drake and for his online courses/textbooks: Underactuated Robotics, and Robotic Manipulation. - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/russ-tedrake-88648a4a/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/russ-tedrake-88648a4a/) ### Ben Burchfiel Chief Technology Officer Dr. Ben Burchfiel is Co-founder & CTO of Walden Robotics, where he leads technology strategy and execution across research, development, and engineering. Ben has over a decade of experience translating robot learning breakthroughs from research to production and industry adoption, building and scaling high-performing teams along the way. At Aurora Innovation, he developed and deployed the company’s first production ML model for autonomous driving. At the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), he co-led the 60+ person robot learning organization behind Diffusion Policy, UMI, OpenVLA, and LBM 1.0; work cited thousands of times, adopted by dozens of robotics companies, and foundational to modern embodied AI. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Duke University and conducted postdoctoral research at Brown University. - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/benburchfiel/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benburchfiel/) ### Kerri Fetzer-Borelli Chief Operating Officer Kerri Fetzer-Borelli is Co-founder & COO of Walden Robotics, where she leads Business Operations and Robot Operations. Kerri has over a decade of experience designing operating systems that turn R&D into scalable, accountable organizations across automated driving, robotics, and technology transfer and adoption. She began her career in test and evaluation in robotics and ballistics, and spent time working in the nuclear power industry as a journeyman ironworker and welder. - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerri-fetzer-borelli-6b067391/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerri-fetzer-borelli-6b067391/) ### Dave Johnson Chief Product Officer Dr. David Johnson is a Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Walden Robotics. Dr. Johnson delights in building useful automation solutions for customers. Throughout his career, he has focused on transforming cutting-edge technology into practical devices. Prior to Walden, Dr. Johnson was Director of Sony’s Robotic Gastronomy project. He joined Sony after he sold Dexai Robotics, the kitchen robotics company that he founded. Dexai built food-safety-certified robotic sous-chefs which assembled complete meals in existing kitchens using customers' existing recipes and ingredients. As CEO of Dexai, Dr. Johnson led the company through raising capital, developing its first products, and ultimately selling the business.  Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Dr. Johnson led a team building a world-leading optical atomic clock, built extreme endurance autonomous helicopters, and developed (at the time) the world’s largest atomic fountain. He holds a PhD in Physics from Stanford University. - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmsjohnson/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmsjohnson/) ### Adrien Gaidon Chief Strategy Officer Dr. Adrien Gaidon is a Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Walden Robotics. Dr. Gaidon is  an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, a former Partner at Calibrate Ventures, and the former executive director of the ML division at Toyota Research Institute (TRI) with experience ranging from research to commercial transfer in mass-market, safety-critical products at Toyota. As a technical expert, Dr. Gaidon has nearly two decades of experience in Physical AI, including a PhD in Machine Learning at the Microsoft Research - Inria joint center in Paris, and industrial R&D experience in Computer Vision, Autonomous Driving, and Robotics at Xerox and Toyota. Dr. Gaidon has won several awards, contributed to more than 100 patents, and published more than 100 scientific articles at top AI venues like CVPR and NeurIPS (overall cited more than 16,000 times). As an executive, Dr. Gaidon has experience in corporate strategy as well as building and leading world-class teams to invent, develop, and ship new solutions to hard real-world problems from state-of-the-art AI models to large-scale ML cloud infrastructure. As an investor, Dr. Gaidon has evaluated more than a thousand deep tech early stage startups, invested in half a dozen, and supported a portfolio of nearly 30 companies through their AI, data, and go-to-market strategies. - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrien-gaidon-63ab2358/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrien-gaidon-63ab2358/) ### Siyuan Feng Principal Architect Dr. Siyuan Feng is Co-founder & the Principal Architect of Walden Robotics. He has a strong track record of translating cutting edge research ideas into compelling systems ranging from full-size bipedal locomotion (DARPA Robotics Challenge), robust dexterous manipulation (Dishloading Demonstration at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI)) and revolutionary policy learning (Diffusion Policy).  Throughout his career as a hands-on roboticist, Siyuan accumulated excellent technical depth and breadth across the entire robot software stack as well as deep intuition and understanding of the current state-of-the-art and its limits. He also co-led TRI's Large Behavior Model effort focusing on scaling its data collection, evaluation and AI pipelines. He holds a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/siyuan-feng-8ba325294/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/siyuan-feng-8ba325294/) ### Rares Ambrus Head of AI Dr. Rares Ambrus is Co-Founder and Head of AI at Walden Robotics, and leads ML research, engineering, and strategy. Dr. Ambrus has 13 years of industry R&D experience, including overseeing ML research, model training, evaluation, and deployment. Most recently, he was head of computer vision and machine learning at Toyota Research Institute (TRI). Prior to TRI, he worked on state-of-the-art systems in robotics, automated driving, and virtual and augmented reality, building and managing world-class technical teams across Asia, Europe and the United States. Dr Ambrus holds a PhD in robotics from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, has published over 70 papers in peer reviewed conferences and journals, and holds more than 50 granted patents. - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/rare%C8%99-ambru%C8%99-b04812125/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rare%C8%99-ambru%C8%99-b04812125/) --- ## Build with us. - [Join Walden](/careers.md) - [Hire a Robot](/contact.md) --- **More content:** [Walden Robotics | Build the Future of Physical AI with Us](/.md) | [News](/news.md) | [subprocessors-appendixiii-dpa](/subprocessors-appendixiii-dpa.md) | [gtcs](/gtcs.md) | [Hire a Walden Robot](/contact.md) | [terms-of-service](/terms-of-service.md) | [Work at Walden](/careers.md) | [privacy-policy](/privacy-policy.md) | [autonomy-is-a-ratio](/news/autonomy-is-a-ratio.md) | [walden-samsung-sds-partnership](/news/walden-samsung-sds-partnership.md) | [why-walden](/news/why-walden.md) | [walden-robotics-launches-from-stealth](/news/walden-robotics-launches-from-stealth.md) --- Website developed by [monogram.io](https://monogram.io)