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Hydraulics is a $750 billion market that hasn't seen a real breakthrough in actuation in decades. Hiten Sonpal is running the company trying to end it.
RISE Robotics started in 2011 with an MIT-affiliated team chasing an Iron Man-style exosuit. They could not find an actuator strong, fast, or efficient enough to build it, so they invented one — Beltdraulic, a fluid-free linear actuator that pulls with belts rather than pushing fluid. Then they made the decision that defined the company: drop the exosuit and go after the hydraulics market itself.
Hiten Sonpal joined as CEO two years ago to solve a problem that was never scientific. The technology worked. The patents — more than twenty of them — were solid. What the company needed was commercialization, and that is what Hiten had spent a career learning, first at iRobot's military business, which shipped 1,200 bomb-disposal robots to Iraq and Afghanistan, and later on consumer teams that moved nine million units across 20 products.
He walks Henry through three business lines running in parallel: an Air Force program to modernize 1,500 aging munitions handling trucks, a hydraulic-free liftgate developed with Anthony Liftgates, and cylinders sold directly to OEMs. Along the way he explains why the team chased a Guinness World Record on purpose, how they choose customers, and why extending a pump's service interval from three months to nine months triples a customer's service revenue without adding a single technician.
The conversation closes on capital and country: how RISE opened its institutional round to everyday investors through Regulation Crowdfunding on Wefunder, drawing $5.8 million in interest against a $5 million cap, and how Hiten got from a missed cutoff on an Indian entrance exam to running an American robotics company.
Topics covered:
- Why a bigger market beat a better story
- The muscle analogy behind Beltdraulic
- Scaling manufacturing, application engineering, sales, and distribution simultaneously
- Selecting customers rather than landing them
- Feasibility, desirability, viability
- Verification versus validation, and what a real pilot uncovers
- Patents as a moat when software moats disappear
- Regulation Crowdfunding as both capital and marketing
Guest: Hiten Sonpal, CEO, RISE Robotics
Website: https://www.riserobotics.com
Investor page: https://invest.riserobotics.com
Hiten is reachable on LinkedIn and accepts meeting invitations from interesting people.
Host: Henry Harrison The Henry Harrison Podcast — Entrepreneurs, Business and Finance https://www.henryharrison.com
