Dexter Industries Joins Modular Robotics

Dexter Industries has been acquired by Modular Robotics, a leader in educational robotics!  Our teams joined forces in July, and have been integrating since. This is a fantastic opportunity for Dexter Industries to increase our impact and work on the next generation of robotics in education.  Modular Robotics is a leader in the educational technology space compelled by the inspiring mission of changing the world with thousands of small robots and enabling learners to understand the complexity in the world around us.  Dexter Industries is excited to further this meaningful mission alongside our new colleagues at Modular Robotics!

Back in 2009, when I first launched Dexter Industries alone at a kitchen table, I had a small, aspirational hope of where our journey was headed.  I wanted to build robots, knew only a little about coding and hardware, and was happily naive about what it took to get a hardware company off the ground.  How hard could it be? Since then, our team has built thousands of robots that were adopted into classrooms, laboratories, universities, and homes around the world.  The long path from that kitchen table to today has been buttressed with some amazing people, exhilarating highs, a few humbling setbacks, and a lot of learning. Dexter Industries’ success and reach exceeded my wildest imagination.  Until we met with Modular Robotics.

Fast Forward to the Present.

Did I mention we’re thrilled to join forces with Modular Robotics?  We stand in awe of their work, their passion for modern education, and the design and attention to detail that goes into their products. You may already be familiar with Cubelets, among others.  Personally, I love using Cubelets with my own children, where even my three-year-old enjoys the intuitive simplicity. I admire their design ethos and I am amazed at how the robotic blocks grab kids attention, inspire them to build, and help them understand technology.  I have to peel them out of my kids hands to get them to go to sleep.

Modular Robotics’ story resonates with ours: we are both scrappy, both born on a kitchen table, both risk takers, and we both strive to build products that change the world: one student at a time. Modular Robotics products are designed to teach kids about complex systems and computational thinking, and they do a fantastic job.  We believe by joining forces we will bring children and adults alike, a full robotics experience that includes computational thinking through advanced programming.

Thank you to our thousands of customers.

Over the last several years Dexter Industries has been able to build engaging robots because of our customers: their passionate enthusiasm for our Raspberry Pi and Micro:bit robots, their feedback to help us grow, their generous support of our codebase, and their engaging interaction with our team.  Our company would be nothing without the educators, hobbyists, and engineers who saw through our initially amateur packaging, contributed to improving our instructions and documentation, and carried our robots into your schools, hackathons, laboratories, and living rooms.

Thank you to the long list of advisors and mentors that have guided us along the way.

Many of you started as customers and hopped in to tell us how we could do better, or helped us see an overlooked opportunity.  Hardware is hard; starting and running a hardware company could never happen without an ecosystem of wise folks to help you through the journey.

Thank you to my teammates at Dexter Industries.

Over the years our team grew to include incredible folks that passionately championed our customers and our cause.  I am grateful to you for your hard work to build great robots, sensors, and supporting documents for our customers. While many other companies have come, made a short-term splash, and gone, our team worked closely together to build quality robots and curriculum that continues to thrive in the marketplace.

Here’s to the Future!

I’m thankful that almost everyone from our team is coming along for the ride, and the same happy faces you talked to on the phone, forums, or saw on our social media will be with us at Modular Robotics.  We will continue to sell our robots and to support you, our loyal customers and fans. Everyday, just like before, we will support our products, such as our popular GoPiGo3, and answer your emails. You may not have noticed it, but earlier this month if you ordered a GoPiGo3, it shipped from Boulder, Colorado!  That’s the sort of seamless transition you can expect!

A Thank You Gift

Finally, I am also thrilled to announce that starting today all of Dexter Industries’ curriculum will be free.  This is our first step together to further our mission of getting more robots in the hands of the growing field of eager newcomers to robotics.  Our hope is that by offering curriculum for free we will expand the range of learners who use our robots to start coding and expand their understanding of robotics.  Providing free lesson plans (like GoBox Missions and Mars Rover lessons) supports our unified goal of inspiring students to become better thinkers by using problem solving techniques like computational thinking to master and manipulate complex systems.

Finally . . .

I am grateful this acquisition will allow our products to expand and innovate further, and continue to reach thousands of students, engineers, and curious humans.  I am thrilled about our next chapter and all the great things to come, as we join forces with Modular Robotics!