Original Article
The South Philadelphia company sends robots into mines and other hard-to-reach spaces. Its IPO is also a window into a growing regional robotics scene.
Startup profile: Exyn
- Founded by: Vijay Kumar and Nader Elm
- Year founded: 2014
- Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA
- Sector: Robotics
- Funding and valuation: ~$60 million raised
- Key ecosystem partners: University of Pennsylvania
Not long ago, mapping an underground mine meant sending in a worker with a sensor on the end of a long stick and hoping conditions held. Exyn Technologies developed a way to send in a robot instead.
“You can think of us as sitting at the intersection of high-accuracy rapid mapping and autonomous navigation,” Exyn COO Ben Williams said.
The Philly-based company builds software that helps drones and other robots move through difficult spaces on their own, without relying on GPS, a preloaded map or a constant communications link. Underground mining became an early fit, and over time it expanded from that initial use case into a broader autonomy business.
Now it has hit a new milestone: this week, it went public. The company priced its initial public offering at $7.75 per unit, offering 2.5 million units for gross proceeds of about $19.4 million before expenses, and announced it would begin trading on the Nasdaq Capital Market on May 15 under the ticker symbols EXYN and EXYNW.
To Williams, the IPO is a sign of the under-the-radar robotics ecosystem growing in and around Philadelphia. “We went from one specific use case to four industries, four verticals,” Williams said.
Those verticals now include mining, geospatial work, defense-related government projects and software licensing for robotics manufacturers. Williams said Exyn is part of a small but growing group of robotics and robotics-adjacent companies in the region, with executives informally sharing advice on supply chains, operations and the realities of scaling deep tech.
From Penn research to publicly traded stock
Exyn spun out of the University of Pennsylvania more than a decade ago, drawing on the work of Vijay Kumar and Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab, known as the GRASP Lab. Kumar co-founded the company with Nader Elm. Williams joined around 2019, just before the Series A, with a specific assignment.
“My charter was to productize the research,” he said.
Williams said the Penn connection helped early, both through talent and through alumni and investor relationships that opened doors as the company raised money.
Since Williams joined, Exyn raised another $50 million to $60 million in venture funding, he said. He described the company’s path as uneven at times. After peaking at 70 employees, there were layoffs. The staff stands at about 45 people today.
The company has drawn talent not just from Penn, but from Temple, Drexel and other schools in the area, Williams said — another sign, in his view, that Philly’s robotics scene runs deeper than many people realize.
Moving ahead with physical AI
Exyn started with drones, but Williams said the core technology is in the software.
It still offers hardware, including a package that combines software, sensors and compute, but it also licenses its autonomy software to drone makers and ground-robot manufacturers that want to add those capabilities to their own systems.
That shift has widened Exyn’s market. Williams said the company now operates in more than 30 countries, with end users carrying out more than 1,500 autonomous missions each month.
It has also widened the use cases. What started with a single gold mine in Chelopech, Bulgaria, now stretches into construction monitoring, infrastructure inspection, forestry, defense-related work and other geospatial applications. Williams said that BMW, for instance, uses Exyn to regularly remap its production facilities, giving the automaker an updated digital record of its floor space.
Exyn’s next growth phase, Williams said, includes both hardware and software, but he put particular emphasis on licensing the company’s autonomy technology to robot manufacturers, an opening he sees as US policy and market shifts push more Western manufacturers to look for non-Chinese drone suppliers.
In the IPO announcement, Exyn said it intends to use the net proceeds for growth capital, working capital, debt repayment and general corporate purposes.
Exyn is part of a growing category of AI applications that exist firmly in the outside world.
“We are not generative AI,” Williams said. “We are physical AI, and we are autonomous