Siddhartha (Sidd) Srinivasa joined Madrona as a Venture Partner in 2025. He is also a professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Sidd’s research focuses on enabling robots to perform complex physical tasks safely and effectively with and around people.
Journey to Madrona
Sidd has been splitting time between academia and industry since 2014. Sidd co-founded Berkshire Grey in 2014 to leverage cutting-edge robotics and AI to automate fulfillment. Berkshire Grey raised over $250M from top VCs Khosla, NEA and Canaan and went public in 2018. Sidd also led Amazon’s Robotics and AI efforts in fulfillment from 2018-2022. He joined Cruise as a distinguished engineer from 2022-2025, inventing, building, and deploying new AI algorithms for driverless cars.
Lessons learned
- Robotics is a last-mile problem.
- Always revisit white spaces in AI and robotics. The field moves so quickly that what was once inaccessible may already be within reach.
- The surest way to understand a concept deeply is to teach it.
When he’s not in the office…
Sidd loves to cook, play tennis competitively, and write code.
Noteworthy
Sidd has been working on robotics since 1999. Before moving to UW in 2017, Sidd spent 18 years at The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, first as a PhD student and then as a professor, where he established the Personal Robotics Lab. Sidd’s work spans robot motion planning, human-robot interaction, and machine learning. He has led several large university projects on outdoor autonomy, assistive care, and field support on the battlefield. Sidd is an IEEE Fellow and has won several best-paper awards.