Ep 97 | Why Robotics Keeps Rebuilding the Same Infrastructure (w/ Stephen James)

Stephen James is the founder and CEO of Neuracore, and Assistant Professor of Robot Learning at Imperial College London:

In this episode, Stephen shares his path from growing up in Wales to spending a decade at Imperial, a postdoc at Berkeley, and eventually founding Neuracore. Not because he wanted to be a startup founder, but because he kept running into the same problem again and again: every robotics team rebuilding the same infrastructure from scratch.

We talk about what actually slows robotics teams down, why data pipelines matter more than clever algorithms, and how Neuracore aims to become the infrastructure layer that lets teams focus on deployment instead of plumbing.

Stephen also reflects on imposter syndrome, work ethic, moving between academia and industry, and why Europe can and should build its own robotics infrastructure instead of copying Silicon Valley playbooks.

A very honest conversation about building foundations, not hype, and why scaling robotics is mostly about removing friction.