Jean-Francois (Jeff) Legault

Cofounder and Executive Vice President, Business Development

Jeff is a robotics executive who combines a rare mix of excellent technical background, strategic business development, resource management and operational leadership. He cofounded Carnegie Foundry in 2019 to bring his deep understanding of the unmet needs autonomous robotics and AI could address across a broad swath of industrial challenges. 

Jeff is Associate Director of the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), a semi-autonomous unit within Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. NREC is the most advanced robotics R&D center in the world with a team of over 150 robotics engineers. At NREC, he works closely with innovation executives, product line owners and industry leaders in energy, manufacturing, logistics, mining, agriculture, and others. He advises on robotic technology trends to help organizations prepare for changes that advanced robotics will bring to their industries in the next decade. He also works hand in hand with business leads to identify goals and objectives that shape the engineering engagements with NREC that will deliver the most valuable autonomy and robotics solutions with the strongest ROI. 

This broad exposure to industries, functions and capability gaps gives Jeff rare insight into the innovation constraints across different industries and a window into which technologies will have broad, cross industry application and value.

Jeff holds a M.Sc. in Physics from Sherbrook University, Canada.