Fellow, First Movers, The Aspen Institute
Principal, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund at Amazon
Born (sign in to see)Male
Nick Ellis works at Amazon’s $2Bn Climate Pledge Fund and $1Bn Industrial Innovation Fund. He attended Stanford University.
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Zipline triples South SF factory for Platform 2 urban drone delivery, sparking robotics hiring. Wing scales suburban routes, Amazon MK30 faces payload limits, boosting demand for sensor fusion engineers.
Zipline secured $600M to expand autonomous drone delivery across US cities, triggering a hiring sprint for engineers and recruiters. With 2.5M deliveries flown, it faces competition from logistics AI and Amazon, while creating rural ops jobs.
Figure AI upgraded its Helix vision-language-action model in June 2025 with force feedback and temporal memory, allowing humanoid robots to recover from interruptions like conveyor jams. The upgrade coincides with renewed UPS warehouse pilot talks, a $1 billion Series C at $39B valuation, and demons
Amazon's Kirkland factory builds Project Kuiper satellites using retrained warehouse workers, racing an FCC deadline while Starlink leads. Local colleges support the model, which stops at rocket launch.
Apptronik's senior UX designer hire signals its shift from lab prototypes to commercial humanoid robot deployments, emphasizing workflow design and human-robot interaction over hardware specs, with Apollo running at Mercedes, GXO, and Robot Park.