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Person

Jacob Zietek

Founder and CEO of Ixian Robotics, which he announced in September 2026 to deploy intelligent robots in support of American reindustrialization. Previously an Engineering Fellow on Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund, and before that a founding team member at Persona AI working on robot manipulation for industrial humanoids. Studied computer science at Purdue University, where he researched gaze control for visuolinguomotor policies at the CoRAL Lab and founded ML@Purdue.

American · 1 current role · 1 founding

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Physical AI footprint (4)

The physical AI companies Jacob is connected to that DEPLOY verifies. The full record is one click away.

  • Ixian Roboticsverified→
    Founder

    Robotics company founded in 2026 by Jacob Zietek to deploy intelligent robots in support of American reindustrialization.

  • Andreessen Horowitzverified→
    Former Engineering Fellow, American Dynamism

    Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a Silicon Valley venture capital firm founded in 2009 by [Marc Andreessen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen) and [Ben

  • Persona AIverified→
    Former Founding team member, robot manipulation

    Houston-based company building purpose-built industrial [Humanoid](/companies/humanoid-ai) robots for shipyards, manufacturing, and defense.

    Seed · $27M1 model
  • Shield AIverified→
    Former Engineering Intern, reinforcement learning

    American defense-autonomy company (San Diego, founded 2015 by Brandon Tseng, Ryan Tseng, and Andrew Reiter) building the Hivemind AI pilot and the V-BAT VTOL dr

    Series G · $2B6 verified deployments · Hivemind at U.S. Air Force CCA Program, USA →1 incident2 models

Current roles (1)

Foundings (1)

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Former / Previously (3)

  • Andreessen Horowitz Engineering Fellow, American DynamismSecondary-verified
  • Persona AI Founding team member, robot manipulationSecondary-verified
  • Shield AI Engineering Intern, reinforcement learningReported, not verified

Education (1)

  • Purdue University BS, Computer Science? to 2023

Sources (1)

  1. https://zietek.dev/blogs/starting_ixian.html

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