Nobody Is Ever Going to Buy a Robot

What we talked about.

Sunny Ray talks with Max Zavet (Maxim Zavet), founder and CEO of Deploy Robotics, a company offering robotic labor as a service for healthcare operators through a monthly subscription instead of hardware ownership. Max explains his path from lawyer to early Canadian cannabis producer to robotics founder, drawing parallels between the regulatory uncertainty of cannabis and the emerging robotics industry. He argues labor is healthcare's largest and most strained expense, making it a natural, if slow moving, market despite its complexity. Deploy positions itself as an out of the box, OEM agnostic layer that handles implementation, task optimization, and support so operators never touch hardware directly. They discuss an early pilot at an 80 bed care home in Western New York, the role of board member David Cutler in validating the thesis, and why the company stays nonclinical for now while building trust. Max compares Deploy's approach to Waymo, betting that accumulated real world experience, not manufacturing, will create lasting value. The conversation closes on funding strategy, human supervised operations trending toward full autonomy, and why treating elderly care with dignity, not dehumanization, is the real goal.

Deploy Robotics founder Max Zavet explains why healthcare operators will rent robotic labor by subscription instead of ever buying and maintaining robots themselves.

The questions, and the answers.

What is Deploy Robotics and why should people care?

Our thesis is that businesses need labor given the acute shortages facing almost every industry, especially healthcare. Robotics isn't an out of the box solution, nobody buys it, opens the box, and it starts doing tasks on its own. We want to be that out of the box solution, taking care of everything for operators as they add robotic labor to supplement their existing, shrinking workforce.

You're not a roboticist by training. What was the moment robotics became the thing you wanted to build?

I've been a serial entrepreneur. I started as a lawyer and got into the Canadian cannabis industry early, setting up a facility from seed to sale before clear regulations existed. I saw similarities between that experience and the emerging robotics industry, especially the compliance and standards healthcare requires. I'm not technical, but I can see the trees from the forest and understand what needs to be delivered as we enter this new age of robotic healthcare.

Healthcare is one of the slowest buying environments. Why start there?

Labor is a healthcare operator's largest expense item, and they're already spending heavily on it with diminishing returns. We don't fit the typical new equipment sales cycle. We're more of a hybrid between equipment and providing labor as a service. We believe we can build a moat by being early in healthcare and focusing on humanoid robotics, developing modules with high value today that will grow in capability over time.

Can you walk me through the 80 bed care home in Western New York and what actually changes when robotic labor shows up?

We've visited a few times, and it's a great operation with welcoming staff. Even though they're strong operators, there's a real gap in resident engagement. A robot there to talk to residents, gather information, and relay it to loved ones or staff could ease pressure on existing staff. Nobody was antagonistic toward it. They were focused on how it could help them deliver better care.

What does a nurse actually stop doing on the day this works?

Right now our approach is nonclinical while we build trust and prove the modules are effective, safe, and reliable. We'd like to move into more clinical roles eventually, but nurses and doctors make judgment calls based on training and experience. You're not going to replace that with robots anytime soon, or maybe ever. We believe robotic labor can support almost everything up to what a nurse or doctor does, aside from that on the spot decision making.

Where exactly is the human sitting in a human supervised setup, and does that ratio ever go to zero?

Initially the human would sit in the care home, though we don't expect that everywhere. Ultimately the goal is no human teleoperation at all, maybe one person overseeing hundreds of robots in case of failure. Full time human in the loop isn't sustainable long term. Initially it's an added expense we rely on, but we believe that reliance will shrink significantly in the years ahead.

How did you land your first operator?

We had great conversations with academic research institutions, but they were bureaucratic and slow. A warm introduction through a friend led to an operator in Western New York with three locations. They were excited about the value we could bring and saw an opportunity to become a partner, opening their doors and giving us access to their people and patients to integrate into our modules.

Staying OEM agnostic sounds hard. What breaks first when you support two manufacturers at once?

We'll likely settle on one or two OEMs as our base, but most of the work is in implementing workflows and task optimization modules like emergency detection and escalation, psychosocial support, and information handoff. Those modules will outlast any single hardware requirement and need to work across any OEM in a healthcare setting. That's where we believe the real value lies, not in the physical hardware itself.