Ms. Helen Greiner

Chairman and CoFounder, iRobot Corporation

Helen Greiner is the Chairman and CoFounder of iRobot Corporation, a company that she co-founded in 1990. iRobot is currently the leader in the mobile robotics field, an emerging high growth industry. Aggressively pursuing both the consumer and the military market for robots, our products include the Roomba® Robotic Floorvac, an autonomous vacuum, and the PackBot™ tactical mobile robot, a military robot.

Ms Greiner attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she majored in Mechanical Engineering with concentrations in Economics and Electrical Engineering. Her Masters in Computer Science was performed in the MIT Artifical Intelligence Lab under Dr. Ken Salisbury. She worked at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a student building gripper systems for space satelites. In 1989, after graduation she founded a company commercializing JPL Technology called California Cybernetics. This company sold force controllers and performed government sponsored research in robotics.

In 1990, Ms Greiner saw this technology as the basis for a whole new class of products - ones that improve life by taking on dangerous and tedious jobs. She moved back to the East Coast to start iRobot (then called IS Robotics) with two like minded business partners, MIT classmate Colin Angle and Prof. Roney Brook (Dr. Brooks is now the director of the Computer Science Labs at MIT). iRobot is now the industry leader in robotics dedicated to creating realistic robotic solutions to real world problems. Under her leadership, iRobot has grown from a garage venture to over $50M with 4 locations in MA, DC, CA, and HK. Ms Greiner raised $28M in venture capital to support growth. Ms Greiner took the military side of the business from zero, to running DARPA contracts, to participating in the Future Combat Systems program - the largest army procurement program ever funded. In the consumer space, iRobot’s Roomba™ Robotic Floorvac is the best selling robot ever with over one million units in homes around the world.