Portrait of Olivier Duchenne

Olivier Duchenne, PhD

CEO and Co-founder of ORA Robotics.
Ex-Director of Robotics @ Mistral AI, Ex-Meta AI Researcher and Serial Entrepreneur

X @inventorOli Google Scholar

I build robots. I am CEO and co-founder of ORA Robotics. We provide turnkey robots-as-a-service for manufacturing, and aim to build a frontier VLA model. Before that I led robotics at Mistral AI, and was an AI researcher at Meta / FAIR, where I was a core contributor to Llama 3. I started in computer vision, with a PhD at ENS Paris and a postdoc at CMU. ORA is my third startup.

Résumé

SOTA
robotics model Robostral Navigate, co-author at Mistral AI
3
startups: ORA Robotics, Adriel, Solidware (exited)
15
robotics researchers recruited at Mistral AI
Llama 3
core contributor at Meta / FAIR
$18M
raised for Adriel
23.6k
academic citations

Work

ORA Robotics

CEO and Co-founder

Turnkey robots-as-a-service for manufacturing. We aim to build a frontier VLA (vision-language-action) model, and own the whole chain behind it: the capture hardware, the data factory and the models that make each deployment better than the last.

Mistral AI

Director of Robotics

Led robotics at Mistral AI. Recruited a team of 15 robotics researchers. Co-author of SOTA model Robostral Navigate.

Meta / FAIR

AI Researcher

Core contributor to Llama 3. Code generation and synthetic data. Co-author of SWE-RL (NeurIPS 2025).

Adriel

Co-founder, Lead Scientist · 1 year

AI-automated marketing agency: creates the ads, publishes them, optimizes the campaigns and reports. Clients include Nike, Samsung, L'Oréal and LG. Built and managed a team of 30; raised $18M.

Solidware

Co-founder, Lead Scientist · 2.5 years · exited

Machine learning for underwriting and credit scoring. Built the AutoML system behind it and a team of 6 ML scientists and engineers. Our underwriting model increased a major insurer's revenue by $70M a year (14%), by the insurer's own numbers.

Education

Focus

Frontier Physical AI

Robot learning and navigation, data collection hardware, deploying robots in manufacturing.

Large models

LLM training, code generation, reinforcement learning, synthetic data.

Building companies

Three startups: recruiting, fundraising, product and B2B.

Publications

Full list on Google Scholar. Citation counts from Google Scholar, October 2026.

Recent: LLMs and robotics

Computer vision: PhD and postdoc

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