Full-Time
Engineering Program Manager
Robotics
Watney
11-50 employees
Autonomous robotics for datacenter infrastructure maintenance
No salary listed
San Francisco, CA, USA
In Person
 Project & Program Management (1) |
|---|
Get referred to Watney
See people who can refer or advise you
- Have run a hardware program at a large company through at least one 0-to-1 cycle.
- Be technical enough that engineers trust your calls without needing to design the hardware yourself.
- Have taken experience from a large company and proved it at a small company.
- Be comfortable owning a program before its definition of done has been established.
- Own schedule, budget, and cross-functional delivery for hardware programs that teach robots new tasks.
- Take a program from first build through validation without relying on an existing process.
- Work directly with engineers designing and building the hardware without performing their design responsibilities.
- Grow into owning robot build and manufacturing programs as needed.
Watney builds autonomous robotic systems that maintain and operate datacenter and supercomputing infrastructure for hyperscalers. The robots perform physical maintenance and monitoring tasks, either teleoperated or autonomous, across large-scale facilities, reducing the need for human presence. The technology uses high-performance runtimes, low-latency cross-continental control, and robust inference to coordinate dexterous robots. Its goal is to enable significant compute scaling by removing manual workload and plugging automation into complex infrastructure, differentiating itself by targeting cloud-scale operators rather than consumer robotics.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
N/A
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Founded
2023
Get referred to Watney
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Meta has tested two Watney robots at Altoona, Iowa since June 2025.
- Watney raised $21 million seed funding in April 2025 from Conviction, Abstract, and A*.
- Watney hired teleoperation and deployment roles in 2026, signaling active customer deployments.
What critics are saying
- Meta’s Watney pilots stay supervised and slower than technicians, limiting near-term revenue.
- A single hyperscaler customer concentration makes one failed pilot or procurement pause deadly.
- Meta or AWS can replace Watney with ABB, Kinova, or in-house robots by 2027.
What makes Watney unique
- Watney targets datacenter breakfix, not general-purpose warehouse robotics.
- Its dual-arm robots handle cabling in hyperscale facilities with low-latency remote control.
- The company sells automation to hyperscalers needing 24/7 infrastructure maintenance at massive scale.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 10%1 year growth
↑ 10%2 year growth
↑ 22%Ex-Google and NVIDIA roboticist raises $5M for AI data centre repair robots. August 4, 2026 * Exclaim Robotics has emerged from stealth with $4.95 million in seed funding, co-led by Playfair Capital and Founderful, to develop AI robots for automating data centre maintenance. * Founder Helen Oleynikova left ETH Zürich in January 2026 to build Exclaim full-time. * The Swiss startup aims to reduce labour-intensive maintenance, improve operational efficiency and strengthen Europe's growing robotics ecosystem. A Zurich robotics startup wants a robot, not a person, to open the next live AI server rack. Exclaim Robotics has come out of stealth with $4.95 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by Playfair Capital and Founderful, to build machines that do the maintenance work data centre operators increasingly can't send a human to do. The fresh capital will accelerate development of its robotic platform as data centre operators seek new ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs and minimise manual maintenance. The founder and the robot. Helen Oleynikova founded Exclaim after 15 years in robotics at Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Willow Garage and ETH Zürich, where she co-created nvblox, a 3D mapping and collision-avoidance tool now built into Nvidia's Isaac ROS. An earlier stint at Microsoft's Mixed Reality and AI Lab in Zurich put her on a robotics project for Azure data centres, her first real look at the problem. She left ETH in January 2026 to build Exclaim full time, joined by founding engineer Patrick Pfreundschuh, who holds a PhD from the same university. Two more founding engineers, longtime collaborators of hers, will join in 2027 after leaving their current jobs. The robot navigates a data hall on its own, finds a rack, and works the front face from floor to top rail without any changes to the building. It's starting narrow: cleaning and replacing fibre-optic connectors and SFPs (small pluggable network transceivers), copper cabling, and failed drives. YC-backed Boost Robotics builds similar repair robots for data centres. Watney Robotics is working on comparable autonomy for inside-the-facility logistics and maintenance. Gecko Robotics, further along and better funded, handles broader industrial inspection. Most of them span inspection and logistics. Exclaim believes everything on one job: hands-on repair inside a live 800-volt rack. The investors and the market. The global data centre robotics market was worth roughly $13.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $44.2 billion by 2030, a 21.6% compound annual growth rate, according to Research and Markets. It's part of a wider bet on the physical layer of AI infrastructure that TFN has tracked before, including Palo Alto-based PicoJool's $12 million raise for optical connectivity in hyperscale data centres. Playfair has co-led robotics bets rounds: a $4.3 million pre-seed round for fellow Zurich startup Ascento, an autonomous security patrol robot, and Recycleye, an AI waste-sorting company it has since exited. As data centre operators worldwide continue to invest in larger and more complex facilities, the need for autonomous maintenance solutions is expected to grow alongside these investments. The startup also joins a growing cohort of European robotics companies developing AI systems for infrastructure, logistics and industrial environments.