Hank Crawford

Co-Founder & CEO Blue Collar Robotics

Hank Crawford is Co-Founder & CEO of Blue Collar Robotics, where he leads the company's mission to make in-store grocery picking affordable for retailers through purpose-built robots delivered as a service, pairing AI-driven autonomy with human-assisted teleoperation.

A technology entrepreneur and commercial leader with more than 35 years of experience in advanced composites, global manufacturing, and robotics, Crawford has founded companies in the United States and China including PURE Material Science, a Guangzhou-based pioneer of continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites and has helped scale advanced technology businesses in senior engineering and commercial roles at Performance Materials Corporation (acquired by Toray), Daimler Trucks in both North America and China, TRB Lightweight Structures, and Avient. Throughout his career, his consistent focus has been reducing the cost of advanced technologies to expand their accessibility from composite components developed for major sporting goods brands to multimillion-dollar material cost savings on Mercedes-Benz heavy trucks. He holds multiple patents in composite materials and manufacturing.

The idea for Blue Collar Robotics was born at Daimler Trucks. In North America, Crawford worked in Advanced Engineering, the group responsible for the company's autonomous truck initiatives; later, based in Beijing, he sat at the epicenter of automotive technology in China as autonomous trucking developed around him. Watching one of the world's largest truck makers and the industry at large invest years and billions into full autonomy, a problem that remains unsolved today, convinced him the sequence was backwards: remote operation could unlock value immediately while autonomy matured. That insight, which found little traction inside a global OEM, became the foundation of Blue Collar Robotics' shared-autonomy model. It was also at Daimler in China, on the team standing up a new plant to localize the Actros heavy-duty truck, that he met his co-founder, Yağmur Han Sağlam.

Crawford earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Gonzaga University and an International MBA from Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands, and spent 15 years living and working in Asia.