HEBI Robotics signs as new tenant in RIDC’s Chocolate Factory
PITTSBURGH, PA — The Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern Pennsylvania (RIDC) announced that HEBI Robotics has signed a five-year lease at the Lawrenceville Technology Center (LTC) supporting RIDC’S ongoing mission to drive regional economic growth and its vision of creating an urban technology park. HEBI Robotics occupies 2,400 square feet on the second floor of the LTC building dubbed “The Chocolate Factory” – a hat-tip to its chocolate manufacturer roots – which is now a growing hub for robotics and technology.
“We chose RIDC knowing we’re going to grow. They have the space and the willingness to work with us should we need to expand before our current lease is up,” said Bob Raida, COO of HEBI Robotics. “The proximity to other robotics companies is also very attractive. All we need to do to meet colleagues is cross the street. We couldn’t do that before.”
HEBI Robotics, a spinoff Carnegie Mellon University’s Biorobotics Lab, was founded in 2014 and takes a LEGO-like approach to robot building. HEBI’s modular robotics platform is used by universities, researchers and industrial partners around the world to create custom robots in a variety of configurations. They currently have nine full-time employees and are looking to add five more in the next six months.
“RIDC acquired the Lawrenceville property with the vision of creating an urban technology park that would attract the sorts of companies that are driving our economy into the future. It’s surrounded by universities commercializing cutting edge research and development, and we felt it could become a desirable business location as well as an anchor for the community,” says Donald Smith, President of RIDC. “Companies like HEBI Robotics support that vision. We want to nurture their growth as best we can.”
About HEBI Robotics
HEBI Robotics builds intelligent and connected building blocks for creating robotic solutions and uses these building blocks to deliver these solutions faster, better, and cheaper than current technology. Well-defined interfaces, internet-enabled connectivity, and smart software tools allow implementers to spend their time focusing on the task at hand rather than low-level implementation details, resulting in faster development. The flexibility and reconfigurability of these tools allow robotic solutions to be more appropriately customized for their tasks, resulting in better robots. Finally, these both result in solutions that are cheaper, both due to reduction in development time and because customization means that only necessary parts are purchased.
About RIDC
The mission of the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern Pennsylvania is to catalyze and support economic growth and high-quality job creation through real estate development and finance of projects that advance the public interest. Through public, private and institutional partnerships, RIDC develops real estate to ensure the region can capture emerging and existing growth opportunities across diverse industry sectors. RIDC has developed industrial and business parks on greenfield and brownfield sites and currently has 11 parks. A not-for-profit entity, RIDC owns over 2,800 acres of land in various industrial parks and manages over 50 buildings. There are nearly 6,000 jobs in RIDC’s tenant facilities. RIDC is also the administrator of Foreign-Trade Zone #33.
