Travis Deyle, PhD
Entrepreneur, Technologist, Scientist, Investor, Curiosity Seeker
I like to get bored, get curious, and get inspired. Over two decades that's led me from a robotics PhD, to a postdoc building cyborg dragonflies, to founding a VC-backed security robotics company, to launching a climate-focused ETF. There are infinite problems to solve and opportunities abound — I just try to turn the interesting ones into reality.
Career Timeline
Two decades of building at the intersection of science, technology, and entrepreneurship.
Climate Global — Founder & Managing Partner
Index Provider & Data Analytics for Climate-Resilient Real Estate
Climate Global democratizes insights from the catastrophe models used by global insurers and reinsurers to create new financial products for real estate. Created the CLIMX Index — the first REIT benchmark to directly integrate insurance-grade catastrophe models into portfolio construction — and launched the Climate Global ETF (Ticker: CLIM), embedding property-level climate and extreme-weather risk analytics within a transparent, rules-based structure.
Cobalt Robotics — Co-founder & CEO — Acquired
Autonomous Security Robots and AI Alarm Filtering
Acquired by Dean Drako (Eagle Eye Networks) in 2024. Co-founded with Erik Schluntz. Built and deployed autonomous security robots in 10 countries on 5 continents with major customers such as Amazon, FedEx, Salesforce and more. Raised $85M in VC from Sequoia, Coatue, Bloomberg Beta and others, plus $40M+ in venture debt and hardware-as-a-service financing from SVB. Achieved ~60% market share in autonomous indoor security.
MIT Technology Review — TR35 Award
35 Innovators Under 35
Named one of MIT Technology Review's '35 Innovators Under 35' as an Inventor. Previous winners include Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jonathan Ive.
![Google[x] Life Sciences (now Verily)](/images/research/smart-contact-lens.jpg)
Google[x] Life Sciences (now Verily)
Microsystems & Healthcare
Part of the microsystems group developing smart contact lenses (glucose-sensing, autofocus) licensed to Novartis and DexCom. Active on the Rapid Eval team vetting new Google[x] moonshot ideas.
Lollipuff — Co-Founder, CTO and Board Member
YCombinator W2013
Co-founded an authenticated designer consignment marketplace. Part of Y Combinator's Winter 2013 class. Featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.
Duke University — Postdoctoral Researcher
NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow
Worked with Dr. Matt Reynolds on cutting-edge wireless backscatter systems: wireless power harvesting and high-speed (5-10 Mbps) wireless data transfer akin to souped-up UHF RFID tags.
Georgia Institute of Technology — PhD
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Healthcare Robotics Lab under Dr. Charles C. Kemp. Thesis: 'Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID for Robot Perception and Mobile Manipulation.' Built some of the first mobile robots capable of operating in real homes.
Georgia Institute of Technology — MS
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Research in RFID-enabled robotics, wireless power harvesting, and wearable computing.
University of Nebraska — Dual BS
Quad-Majors: EE, Computer Engineering, CS, Mathematics
Graduated with dual bachelor's degrees spanning four majors.
Sandia National Laboratories
Livermore, CA
Multiple research internships at Sandia National Labs.
Featured Research
Academic work spanning robotics, wireless systems, and human-machine interaction.
I created and ran Hizook.com, a robotics research and industry publication that grew to become one of the top-three robotics websites on the internet — reaching ~30,000 unique monthly visitors and over 4 million cumulative YouTube views.
“One of the world’s top robotics bloggers”— IEEE Spectrum
Media & Recognition
Travis's work has been featured in leading technology, business, and science publications worldwide.
