Date: Sep 14, 2016 Author: Dan Primack Source: Fortune (
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Robotics pioneer Helen Greiner is no longer CEO of CyPhyWorks, the drone company she founded back in 2008, Fortune has learned.
She will move into a chief technical officer role, while the CEO spot will be filled by Lance Vanden Brook, a onetime Kiva Systems/Amazon executive who was most recently SVP of the energy and industrial group of Pilot Thomas Logistics.
Greiner is best known as the co-founder of Roomba maker iRobot PJT , where she also served as president and chairman. She later founded CyPhyWorks to develop small, multi-rotor drones for the consumer, commercial, and military markets ― raising over $30 million in venture capital funding, plus some additional cash raised via a Kickstarter campaign. Just recently, the Massachusetts company announced that it received an order for one of its tethered surveillance drones (which can fly for days at a time) from the U.S. Army's Rapid Equipping Force.
A source close to the situation says that a formal announcement about the CEO swap is forthcoming, and says that Greiner―still the company's top technologist―had become overextended.
