Steve Chambers said he first heard about the “social robotics” startup Jibo in late 2013, when two friends mentioned the firm to him within two hours on the same day. At the time, Chambers was running worldwide sales, marketing, and business development for Nuance, the big speech-recognition company in Burlington. Chambers went on Jibo’s board last September as executive chairman and helped founder Cynthia Breazeal raise $25 million.
And now Chambers has been tapped as the new chief executive of the Weston company, Jibo said Wednesday. Breazeal, who took a leave from her MIT professorship to build the company and had been serving as CEO, is shifting to the role of chief scientist.
Jibo emerged from stealth mode last year with a crowdfunding campaign for a countertop “family robot” that will be able to coordinate schedules, initiate video chats, relay messages, tell bedtime stories, and snap family photos. That campaign raised $2.3 million from early adopters eager to get their hands on the ’bot, which was initially priced in the $499 to $599 range.
Nuance has developed speech recognition systems used in Ford cars and Apple iPhones, as well as the Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software. Chambers had been president of sales and marketing at the company and before that had been chief marketing officer at SpeechWorks International (a Boston company that Nuance acquired) and PictureTel, a pioneering videoconferencing company bought by Polycom in 2001.
“I’ve been selling disembodied voice and artificial intelligence for a long time, and we always were striving to achieve a rapport and a relationship with users,” Chamber said. “When I met Cynthia and heard about the field of social robotics, I had the sense that there was more that could be done with the interaction between these new technologies and people.”
Unlike iRobot’s Roomba cleaning robots, Chambers said, Jibo is “not a task robot — it really is about a social rapport and companionship.”
The funding round was led by RRE Ventures of New York. Other backers include CRV, Fairhaven Capital, Osage University Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, Formation 8, Samsung Ventures, and several individual angel investors.
Chambers said the company plans to start shipping robots in December and he is currently hunting for office space in downtown Boston.
Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner and on betaboston.com.