Moments that Matter: Elysium Robotics Is Pointing to the U.K. Next

Celebrating the turning points that define our current and alumni fellows’ journeys.

The robots of today have a problem: they can’t use their hands. Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza (Cohort 2024), spent years building a breakthrough solution—and nearly lost it along the way.

Leveraging his background in bioengineering, Alvarez founded Elysium Robotics to solve what he calls the “dexterity problem”—the critical gap limiting what robots can do in the world. Combined with today’s rapid advances in AI, Elysium’s high-dexterity robotic platforms could unlock possibilities that current robots simply can’t reach.

Unlike most other Activate Fellows, Alvarez entered the fellowship with decades of experience—from entrepreneurship to academia to industry, including helping build IBM’s first neural network accelerator, TrueNorth. Before he became a fellow in the Activate Houston Community, he had already spent five years building Elysium.

But things were bleak when Alvarez applied to the fellowship. Cancelled grants drained Elysium’s cash, the playbook he’d been following wasn’t working, and the advice he was getting wasn’t helping.

Then, everything changed. “Activate was the eureka moment,” he said, noting the difference it made to finally have specialized deep-tech support.

“It's been an incredible growth experience. I feel like I've grown more in the past two years at Activate than I did in the previous 40-something,” he said. “It took my company from near death and running out of funding to now thriving—because of the programming, the community, and the halo that comes with having Activate’s seal of approval.”

“I feel like I've grown more in the past two years at Activate than I did in the previous 40-something.”

Elysium is now a team of eight—and it’s going international.

The Austin-based company recently announced that it will be opening a new office in the U.K., funded by the second phase of a grant from ARIA, the U.K.-based R&D funding agency. Elysium’s U.K. office, opening this summer, will focus on developing the software side of Elysium’s robotic platforms.

We sat down with Alvarez to hear more about his journey as an Activate Fellow and the exciting possibilities for Elysium’s game-changing technology.

You’ve mentioned your company having a “near-death experience” before entering the fellowship. What happened?

Without Activate, Elysium would have died, for sure.

When I applied, my company was having a near-death experience. Some grants had been canceled, by no fault of our own. Our funding plan turned upside down, and we actually ran out of cash.

But then, we got the Activate Fellowship, and we started getting grants again: a U.S. Army grant, a small chamber of commerce grant, the ARIA grant. All the messages in a bottle we had sent out started coming back.

Activate was one of the first opportunities that we could very strongly use as leverage for everything else. Just by saying we got into Activate, it showed that we were validated by a very tough selection process, and doors started opening up. Prosperity started snowballing from there.

What changed most for you during the Activate Fellowship?

When I was doing entrepreneurship before Activate, nobody else really knew the playbook for deep tech. The advice I was getting, and the curriculum and the training available to me, were all for small businesses or software or other kinds of things.

What’s unique about the Activate Fellowship is that you suddenly join this community that knows deep tech—and it is a completely different playbook.

Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza (Cohort 2024) and Ian McKendry (Cohort 2024) conversing at the 2024 Activate Reunion.

I realized the roadmap others had been telling me to follow wasn’t the right one. For many years my closest advisor before Activate would say, “You should raise a hundred million dollars at a $1B valuation. You just need to get your story right.” And it was like this constant conflict of not knowing how to build that story. I felt like a failure.

Then as soon as we joined Activate, none of that made sense. I realized what we needed to do was go for government grants and de-risk the technology. Activate was the eureka moment. They've done this with almost 300 fellows now—they know the way.

“I realized the roadmap others had been telling me to follow wasn’t the right one. I felt like a failure. Then, Activate was the eureka moment.”

What’s happening in the world of humanoid robotics, and where does Elysium fit in?

There's this amazing boom happening in robotics, and specifically in new humanoid robots. There are something like 40 companies building in this space, working to deploy general-purpose humanoids for many applications. But the thing they have in common is that they don’t have hands.

And the ones that do have hands are very limited. They're slow, they're expensive, they're fragile, and they're constrained by the fact that hands, I would say, are impossible to build with electric motors.

So we come in and we unlock dexterity—that last missing piece for AI and robotics to actually get things done in the world.

Where are you now in the process of developing robotic hands?

We are getting to a point of technical validation that proves the approach. We started with a little fiber that contracts, and now we're about to start moving fingers. Once people see fingers—then it's such an obvious demonstration that you don't need a leap of faith or imagination or technical knowledge to get it.

“We started with a little fiber that contracts, and now we're about to start moving fingers.”

I think we’ll get there within a year or 18 months or so, and at that point, we’ll be ready for commercialization.

What does the world look like in ten years if Elysium reaches its full potential for impact?

If Elysium achieves massive-scale deployment, we will have solved the dexterity problem and will be able to build robotic hands that can really get stuff done. Combined with the progress that we're seeing in AI, we're going to have incredible robotic systems that can do a lot of the things that humans do today.

I'm really excited about the potential to free people from dull, dirty, and dangerous kinds of jobs. I think we could unleash a new age of automation and abundance, and a new way of thinking about the economy.

Activate exists to ensure breakthrough technologies like Elysium Robotics move from lab to market. We discover, fund, and champion scientists and engineers whose innovations can benefit society—and ensure they have a real path to impact. We provide the funding, mentorship, and ecosystem support that transforms promising science into real-world ventures.