Startup World

Moxi can handle routine tasks for hospital staff such as delivering supplies, lab specimens, and medications.
| Source: Diligent RoboticsDiligent Robotics has added two former executives from autonomous vehicle developer Cruise to its leadership team.
Diligent Robotics named Rashed Haq chief technology officer (CTO) and Todd Brugger chief operating officer (COO).
The company, known for its Moxi robot, said the additions will help drive its expansion beyond its initial focus on hospital logistics in the U.S.For years, Cruise was one of the leading autonomous vehicle developers in the U.S.
However, 2023 brought major road bumps.
These culminated in the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) suspending its permits in the state.
Cruise wasn’t able to recover from this.
In December 2024, GM said it was no longer funding Cruise’s robotaxi work.“As one of the most sensitive and high-stakes environments you could deploy in, hospitals have been the ultimate proving ground for our technology,” said Dr.
Andrea Thomaz, CEO and co-founder of Diligent Robotics.
“We’ve already seen a remarkable impact, and with Rashed and Todd’s seasoned leadership from their time at Cruise, we’re well-positioned to scale.
Their expertise will be instrumental as we accelerate AI-driven product development and expand the reach of our humanoid robots into broader commercial applications.”Diligent reaches beyond hospital applicationsSince its founding in 2017, Diligent has focused on advancing healthcare automation with Moxi.
The company has deployed Moxi in more than 30 hospitals across the U.S.
It has also achieved over one million deliveries and saved hospital staff nearly 600,000 hours.Earlier this year, Thomaz told The Robot Report that Diligent could deploy Moxi into assisted living facilities, for example.
This would help the company adapt to less structured environments.
“If we go from hospitals to assisted living, for example, then you start to see a very interesting trajectory where a company could go from hospitals to structured nursing homes to eventually the home,” Thomaz said.“The tech stack powering our robots draws on many of the same core technologies as self-driving cars – multi-modal perception, predicting human behaviors, real-time planning under uncertainty, and more,” said Vivian Chu, co-founder and chief innovation officer of Diligent Robotics.
“But deploying AI-native humanoid robots at scale in human environments is the next frontier of autonomy.
That’s exactly why Rashed and Todd are joining us – they see what we see: a massive opportunity to apply their experience scaling self-driving to the even more complex domain of human-aware manipulation and mobility.”Chu will be speaking at RoboBusiness (Oct.
15-16 in Santa Clara, CA), a robotics development conference produced by The Robot Report.
Her talk will focus on AI for dexterity and adaptation in high-stakes environments.
She’ll explain how Diligent Robotics takes a hybrid approach to autonomy by combining the reliability of classical robotics with the power of next-gen AI models, all while deploying in dozens of real hospitals where no two elevators, badge scanners, or workflows are the same.Inside Haq and Brugger’s expertiseDiligent Robotics CTO Rashed Haq (left) and COO Todd Brugger.
| Source: Diligent RoboticsHaq most recently served as Cruise’s VP, head of AI and robotics.
He helped build autonomy for self-driving vehicles and scale Cruise to over five million miles of fully driverless vehicles in over cities.
With deep expertise in deploying production AI at scale, he will continue building Diligent’s AI roadmap and unlocking new capabilities for Moxi.“Humanoids and embodied AI systems represent one of the largest industries of our future, akin to foundational sectors like energy and transportation,” said Haq.
“Diligent’s traction in critical, ADA-compliant environments like hospitals is a clear proof point for product-market fit, and the team’s pragmatic approach to creating a data flywheel reinforces their ability to build new form factors for applications in other industries.”Brugger most recently served as COO of Cruise.
He led Cruise’s robotaxi operations and created the framework to scale its fleet from zero to over 500 cars on the road.
His new role as Diligent’s COO will focus on delivering and scaling the full lifecycle of the business.
This includes anything from building and deploying robots to supporting them in the field and driving the commercial strategy that powers growth across healthcare and beyond.“From spending my career helping new technologies make the leap from R&D to real-world deployment, it’s clear that AI and robotics are at a historic inflection point,” said Brugger.
“Diligent stood out because of their focus on execution over R&D.
I’m excited to help scale what they’re already doing—earning trust, ensuring safety, and creating feedback loops from deployments to engineering.”