Company · PickNik Robotics 3 items

One-line positioning

PickNik Robotics is the lead developer of the open-source MoveIt manipulation framework, offering MoveIt Pro as a software foundation that carries robot applications from development and simulation to production.

Key facts

Founded in 2015 in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founder Dave Coleman served as CEO for a decade and is now Founder and Chief Product Officer, with Dave Grant as CEO. The team numbers about 47 people. In October 2023 the company raised a USD 2 million seed round from Cypress Growth Capital and Stellar Ventures. On September 23, 2026, Qualcomm announced its agreement to acquire PickNik at ROSCon Toronto.

Products & tech

The core product, MoveIt Pro, is a robotics application platform for unstructured environments. It ships with more than 600 pre-built behaviors covering vision-guided motion control, ML segmentation, collision avoidance and learned policy execution, together with a Behavior Tree editor and debugger, digital-twin simulation, a production-grade runtime SDK, and an MCP server that connects to agentic AI tools such as Claude and Codex. The platform is hardware agnostic and works with any brand of arm, end effector, depth camera, linear rail or AMR, with ROS compatibility as the primary integration requirement. The company is also the lead maintainer of the open-source MoveIt and MoveIt 2 projects.

Market position

MoveIt is the most widely adopted manipulation framework in the ROS ecosystem, which positions PickNik at the base layer of the robot manipulation software stack. Customers and partners span space, automotive, energy and medical sectors, including NASA, BMW, Lockheed Martin, Philips, Amazon, Google and Samsung. Its differentiation is hardware-agnostic openness and open-source stewardship rather than robot hardware manufacturing.