A founder with liberal arts and business degrees says her company, Dexory, has raised $280 million and that robotics does not require a PhD to build a startup. Oana Jinga said she co-founded the company a decade ago with no experience in robotics and came from marketing, sales and partnerships roles at Telefonica and Google.
Jinga said her background made her unusual in a field that she described as dominated by 'super-qualified scientists who tend to be men.' She said that in the early days at Dexory, it was not unusual to be the only woman in the room at robotics meetings. She added that more women are now visible at conferences, in customer meetings, engineering teams and startup founding roles.
Her central argument is that robotics needs more than hardware talent. As the industry has become a business rather than mainly a research field, she said companies increasingly need product thinkers, designers, operators, salespeople, industry experts and storytellers alongside engineers. The point is not only to make technology work, but to get customers to adopt it and help businesses scale.
Jinga also said the hiring pitch in robotics often misses the mark. In her view, founders should stop selling 'robots' and start selling what the technology makes possible: safer dangerous environments, less waste in global supply chains and AI applied to physical-world problems. She said people are more likely to respond to meaningful problems than to job descriptions centered on LiDAR specifications or navigation algorithms.
The founder linked that talent problem to a broader funding pattern. She said not everyone in robotics has followed a highly specialized path, and that many successful robotics companies have not raised hundreds of millions of dollars even if those are the companies that get the most attention in the media or on LinkedIn. She also said big funding rounds tend to draw the spotlight and that most of those rounds go to male founders.
Jinga pointed to Romania as an example of a broader pipeline forming, saying robotics clubs have been emerging across the country over the past two years and that Romanian teams have won international competitions with both young men and women involved. She said the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe should do the same, with the private sector sponsoring early initiatives and nurturing talent over time.
The market has already voted on one point: robotics is no longer a niche lab exercise. It is a capital-intensive industry that needs commercial discipline, not just academic credentials. That should be welcome news for investors and founders who understand that productivity gains come from execution, adoption and scale.
Capital rewards clear rules. If robotics wants more funding, it will need more than technical purity. It will need open doors, broader hiring and a willingness to treat free enterprise as a team sport, not a closed club.
