A Robot For The World’s Most Dangerous Jobs

Perhaps one of the most important decisions a fledgling founder will make is what to name their office’s conference rooms. For the founders of Minerva Humanoids, a robotics company making its debut this week, the answer was industrial catastrophes. I met them in Chernobyl. Down the hall is Deepwater. One of the phone booths is Piper Alpha, after the North Sea oil platform that exploded in 1988 and killed 167 people.

“We actually take our mission so seriously that we name our conference rooms after disasters,” says Sandor Felber, the company’s 26-year-old CEO.

Minerva’s office is in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. It’s tiny for a robotics company, with just enough room for Felber, his cofounder and CTO Maurice Rahme, their first engineering hire Ali Kuwajerwala, and Roger, their humanoid victim slash product.