I am excited to welcome our newest Executive-in-Residence (EIR) at Bain Capital Ventures, Scott Eckert. Over the next few months, Scott plans to identify, expand, and work closely with our community of founders in automation-related areas (AI, ML, robotics, drones, etc.) as well as software and data projects targeting industrial applications. He will eventually join a promising team in a leadership role.

Over the past few years, BCV has been an active investor as breakthroughs in computer vision, machine learning, and robotics have unleashed a renaissance of research and commercialization around such opportunities as warehouse automation, logistics, manufacturing 4.0, drones and autonomous vehicles. We backed Kiva Systems in its earliest days, and our more recent investments include FourKites, Ike, and Vention.io.

These fields are exactly the areas where Scott has built incredible expertise. I have been fortunate to know Scott for over 20 years, and in that time, he has delivered an unprecedented and successful track record, partnering with the most innovative founders to commercialize and scale revolutionary technology.

Back in the mid-90s, when I was at Trilogy Software in Austin, Scott was across town, working with the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500, Michael Dell, to start selling computers over the Internet. He built, launched, and ran Dell Online, growing it in three years from 0 to $4B revenue — the single largest e-commerce business in the world at the time.

In 2001, Scott and a team of Dell executives founded Motion Computing, an early innovator in tablet PCs. Nearly a decade before the introduction of the iPad, Scott led Motion from inception to $100M+ in revenues, selling its enterprise mobile computing platform into healthcare and field services, among other industries.

Most recently, Scott was President and CEO of Rethink Robotics, a pioneer in collaborative robotics, where low-cost and intelligent robots physically interact with human coworkers in a shared workspace — an increasingly common standard across factory, manufacturing, fulfillment and many other environments.

We are thrilled to have him join our team at this pivotal moment for industrial technology and automation. Scott will be based in Boston, a hub for many of these fields, thanks to cutting-edge research out of local universities like Harvard and MIT. We can’t wait to work together on meeting the next group of visionary founders and technologists — and building the next wave of transformational companies.