Pittsburgh250 — This story is part of a Pittsburgh Media Partnership collaborative reporting project exploring how Southwestern Pennsylvania communities are marking America’s 250th anniversary — and how local history continues to shape civic life today. Technical.ly, City Cast Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh’s Public Source teamed up to explore the region’s economic horizons.
Herbert Televox’s mission: To help with everyday household chores by switching household appliances on or off according to the tune of its user’s voice.
Herbert was considered a state-of-the-art robot when former Westinghouse engineer Roy Wensley filed its patent nearly 100 years ago. A half-century later, Carnegie Mellon University partnered with the same electric company and the U.S. government to found the Robotics Institute. Today, professors train four-legged robots capable of completing search-and-rescue missions in addition to helping humans out at home.
It’s difficult to say what new robotics and artificial intelligence inventions will materialize over the next half-century. But there’s reason to believe that Pittsburgh’s broader tech sector will help transform the city’s built environment and economy: Some of the city’s neighborhoods — including Oakland, Lawrenceville, the Strip and North Shore — have already grown into hubs driven by burgeoning tech startups and universities’ research activities.
But the city’s tech ecosystem has shown little capacity to support maturing startups with capital investments, corporate partnerships and physical space, according to some experts. If the status quo remains the same over the next 50 years, Pittsburgh could continue to be a place where tech businesses start but don’t grow.
“Think about the dot-com era,” said Jenn Apicella, the executive director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. “Pittsburgh missed that opportunity. We had very similar, brilliant minds coming out of research and development, a wide variety of technical talent here, but none of those businesses took root here.”
A shift in focus, however, from innovation to business could keep companies here, allowing more to grow beyond the startup phase. It could also lead to more manufacturing activity.
Will Pittsburgh fix its short circuit?
Westinghouse engineers went on to design two other humanoid robots — Mr. Telelux in 1931 and Elektro the Moto-Man in 1937, which the company showcased two years later at the World’s Fair in New York City.
In 1984, the Pittsburgh region had a moment in the world spotlight again when William “Red” Whittaker, a robotics professor at CMU, and his team sent the Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle (RRV) to the flooded basement of a reactor on Three Mile Island. The mission’s success cemented Pittsburgh as the home of field robotics, or robots that can move through worksites and other tricky terrain.
Whittaker said he moved to Pittsburgh to continue his education at a time when “there just wasn’t a whisper of an idea” that the tech would evolve, or “find a place in the world,” but RRV’s mission on the nuclear reactor site, “raised the belief state, like maybe something could come of it.”
Today, the Pittsburgh Robotics Network estimates that more than 260 deep-tech companies — or those whose products focus on robotics, AI or smart systems — exist within the Pittsburgh region, employing over 11,300 people across Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Yet only 10 companies “exited” last year, meaning that they successfully ended the startup phase by being acquired, merging with another company or becoming publicly traded.
Will that grow? The answer could depend on whether the region can bring together corporations looking to buy, adopt and use startups’ technologies, Apicella said. She pointed to her organization’s partnership with Duquesne Light, which matches the electric company with local AI companies that can help meet the utility’s needs.
With changes like that, “we would be known for the big tech giants that have big offices here and do serious business here — not just where they put an engineering back office or a small place to do research,” she said.
Senior Fellow Mark Muro and Senior Research Assistant Shriya Methkupally, both of the Brookings Institution think tank, have also found that Pittsburgh’s commercial businesses trail other cities in adopting AI, a shortcoming that can hurt startups trying to market their products. But when ranking more than 200 American cities based on their overall preparedness for an AI-driven economy — which factored in talent and innovation in addition to adoption — Muro and Methkupally found Pittsburgh ranked 7th overall.
“I’m rarely counseling places to accentuate the positive — I think it’s often valuable to see one’s debits — but really, it’s very hard to not think that Pittsburgh is one of the absolute centers of AI development and adoption,” Muro said.
The future could also depend on funding. As startups, companies can raise money through government grants, venture capital, angel investments, private partnerships — even family and friends. During most stages of the startup journey, companies vie for venture capital.
While Pittsburgh-based startups raised about $1.5 billion in venture capital funding last year, only a small share came from regional firms. Pittsburgh-area firms’ supply of venture funds stood at only $23 million last year, according to a report by Ernst and Young LLP and Innovation Works. That’s far fewer dollars than the $140 million they had on hand roughly 10 years ago.
“For a deep-tech ecosystem of our scale, there’s not adequate infrastructure available to help these companies scale in the ways that other cities have provided,” Apicella said.
Another close observer of the tech scene said Pittsburgh’s ecosystem may splinter in the future. Aaron Tainter, Innovation Works’ director of accelerator programs, said the city’s next 50 years could see startups mostly fall into two buckets:
“I think you’re gonna see some companies separate and build really big, really promising, and we’ve already seen pieces of that,” said Tainter. “On the other side, with lower-tech software companies, I think you’re gonna see a lot of one-person, million-dollar [revenue] startups.”
“For a deep-tech ecosystem of our scale, there’s not adequate infrastructure available to help these companies scale in the ways that other cities have provided.”
Jenn Apicella, executive director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network
At the same time, Innovation Works’ Kevin Dowling said he’s hopeful the startups that do become highly successful will gain enough visibility to attract more investment to the city over 50 years.
“In that time frame we’ll have enough successes, the Duolingos of the world that have risen, become unicorns, gone public [and] had an exit. We need more of those,” he said. “As those happen, I think that success will spread, it will allow more funding to happen here and attract even more folks from the coast and elsewhere that say, ‘Well, Pittsburgh’s really where it’s at.’”
Spinning out from Oakland
Finding space in Pittsburgh also poses a challenge to some startups, which either need more funding to afford a space, offices that better accommodate their employees or infrastructure that can withstand robotics testing. Over the next 50 years, it could lead to a perpetual “spin out.”
Many of the region’s deep-tech startups begin as research projects at nearby universities — which spend about $2 billion annually on research and development — then “spin out” of the universities to form companies. Because of this, most of Pittsburgh’s young startup companies begin in Oakland.
“In the early stages of these companies, they want to stay close to campus either because that’s what they’re used to, that’s where they live,” said Andrew Millberg, senior vice president of brokerage at the real-estate firm JLL. “With AI companies recently, we’ve seen a lot of companies that have employees that are also still attending classes.”
Tight budgets often mean moves away from Oakland. Dowling, Innovation Works’ Robotics Factory managing director, said the businesses he mentors through the Robotics Factory’s incubator program find space “in the corners of Lawrenceville and Garfield” to lower their costs.
“No one coming out of the accelerator can afford what they’re doing in Bakery Square,” he said, referring to the Walnut Capital development straddling Larimer and East Liberty. “Google can afford it, and a very, very well-funded AI company can afford it, but no one else can.”
Aside from costs, companies may relocate from Oakland to accommodate more employees, commutes or needs for larger spaces for testing or manufacturing. Tech-driven companies sometimes relocate to other states, such as Texas or Arizona, due in part to the state’s building permitting laws and less competitive tax credits, said Tim White, senior vice president of business development and strategy for the Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC).
“When you have a new product, whether it’s an autonomous truck, or energy generation for electrification or new coating material for AV [autonomous vehicles], you need to be able to test it in a real-world environment. That can’t be done inside a lab,” White said.
Because of these factors, Millberg said it’s likely that Oakland will remain “the center of gravity for Pittsburgh’s ‘eds and meds’ economy for a long, long time.”
“The universities are continuing to develop throughout Oakland for their own purposes, further increasing the existing density and forcing most non-university affiliated developers to look outward for opportunities,” he said.
In the long term, CMU plans to focus on “densification,” wrote CMU’s Director of Media Relations Cassia Crogan in an email, through projects akin to the Alan Magee Scaife Hall of Engineering and the Highmark Center for Health, Wellness and Athletics. Pitt’s campus master plan also calls for increasing its number of academic facilities and increasing on-campus housing.
The city is also proposing to add density to Oakland through multi-residential development over the next 25 years, as described in its proposed comprehensive plan.
From testing to manufacturing
The Pittsburgh region has an opportunity in the future to transition from being a leader in developing materials to providing physical spaces to develop and manufacture innovative technology products, said White.
Starting in the 1990s, RIDC and others began redeveloping the city’s riverfronts into innovation testing grounds — something that couldn’t be accommodated in Oakland because of its high density and small floorplates. At the same time, the riverfronts were still close enough to Oakland’s campuses for students and professors.
“It mattered to have something that was arm’s length beyond, and complementary to, the basic research that was occurring on the main campus,” said CMU Professor Whittaker, who helped establish the National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville in 1996.
In addition to the NREC, these developments resulted in the Pittsburgh Technology Center in South Oakland, Lawrenceville’s Tech Forge and technology center, and CMU’s Robotics Innovation Center and Pitt’s BioForge in Hazelwood Green.
White predicts that “major changes in manufacturing are on the horizon,” and the focus will transition to sites such as the Lawrenceville Technology Center and Neighborhood 91 in Clinton, which operate as advanced manufacturing centers.
Dowling of Innovation Works said he also thinks more manufacturing will exist in the Pittsburgh region in 50 years: “There’s been a general awareness that reshoring can happen here” he said, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic and now the U.S. and Israel’s war in Iran have driven up shipping costs.
In the meantime, Millberg expects that Pittsburgh’s riverfronts will only continue to evolve. So far, between 2014 and 2024 alone, Lower and Central Lawrenceville grew in population by 7% and 3%, respectively. The Strip District, which houses several mature university spin-outs, nearly tripled its population over the same period.
The city’s draft comprehensive plan also calls for a further transformation of riverfront neighborhoods over the next 25 years through a focus on increasing mixed-use development.
“If you were here 10, 15 years ago, and you walked through the Strip District, it didn’t look anything like it does today,” Millberg said. “All of that new development along the river, not just the office redevelopments and new construction, but the housing that’s come with it, has been because of tech.”
Mia Hollie is the economic development and housing reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at mia@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Emma Folts.
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