Female Founders 100 | Inc. Magazine
The 100 Women Building America's Most Innovative and Ambitious Businesses
The entrepreneurs on Inc.'s second annual Female Founders 100 list have transformed every major industry in America. Meet the boundless dreamers making the biggest difference in 2019.
No.74
Andrea Thomaz
She's building robots that free nurses to focus on patient care.
Hospitals across the country face an acute shortage of nurses, as well as cost pressures from the move to value-based care rather than a fee-for-service model. Andrea Thomaz's Austin-based company, Diligent Robotics, has developed a robot named Moxi that addresses these problems by freeing nurses to focus on patient care rather than, say, fetching supplies. In late 2018 and early 2019, four Texas hospitals ran monthlong beta tests with Moxi, and the cute, one-armed robot will begin rolling out to hospitals in earnest early next year. Thomaz also sees potential future applications for her company’s technology “in any industry where you can imagine a robot working indoors, side by side with people and doing materials-management tasks.” --Tom Foster