This week on NC Tweener Talks, I sit down with Steven King, the UNC professor and CEO of Blue Sky Robotics, a computer vision company that's pivoted twice in three years, from metaverse avatars to warehouse robots to hospital automation. It's a company-heavy episode: Steven walks through the technical bets, the client-funded path to product-market fit, and the specific numbers behind a 99.5% accuracy commitment that forced his team to rebuild their system from scratch. He also shares hard-won lessons on co-founder relationships and knowing when to let go of a name, a market, or an idea that isn't working.
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Who is Steven?
Steven King is CEO and co-founder of Blue Sky Robotics, a Chapel Hill-based computer vision company that helps hospitals automate operational tasks like surgical tray prep and dining tray verification. Steven has spent about 15 years as a professor at UNC, where he runs an innovation lab focused on emerging technologies, and he's currently a distinguished tenured professor there despite not holding a PhD. His graduate work, a master's in computer science focused on computer vision, came through an executive program at the University of Liverpool. Before UNC, he was director of innovations at The Washington Post, leading designers, developers, and data scientists on the future of digital media, and before that he studied photojournalism at Western Kentucky University. He co-founded Blue Sky Robotics three years ago.
Highlights
The pivot, twice over: Blue Sky Robotics started as a volumetric capture system for metaverse avatars, using 4–5 cameras to do what once took 100–200, before pivoting to robotic vision when the metaverse market never materialized, and later pivoting again from warehouses into healthcare.
99.5% accuracy over 10,000 picks: An early warehouse client selling fishing tackle through Bass Pro Shops and Mystery Tackle Box demanded 99.5% accuracy across 10,000 picks, with 10,000 SKUs rotating every four hours. Steven’s team rebuilt its vision system from scratch to hit the target, a number robotics conference audiences still ask him to repeat: “Point?”
The “IoT toaster”: Steven describes the ideal product as an appliance that plugs into a hospital’s network, solves one operational problem exceptionally well, and can scale across roughly 6,100 U.S. hospitals instead of requiring a custom build for every client.
Real numbers from the healthcare pivot: At Blue Sky’s hospital clients, 20,000 dining trays go out each day, with 12% containing errors and 3% violating dietary restrictions. Separately, 20% of U.S. surgeries begin without the correct instrumentation on the tray, causing delays and keeping patients under anesthesia longer.
Cascading models: Blue Sky trains on large vision-language models, distills them into local models running on NVIDIA Jetson edge cards for real-time on-site inference, and escalates unfamiliar objects to the cloud. What the cloud learns is then folded back into the local model.
Real data is the moat: “Synthetic simulation data gets you 80, 85% there,” Steven says, but Blue Sky’s advantage comes from real action data generated by robot picks in the field, experience that can transfer from handling floppy, reflective fishing tackle to surgical instruments.
Built on clients, not VC: Blue Sky bootstrapped through paying customers rather than raising venture capital first. Steven says the approach slowed early progress but forced the team to build products with immediate business value. The company now plans to raise capital this fall to fund its healthcare expansion.
Discipline over revenue: The team has walked away from one-off projects that couldn’t scale, even when doing so caused a visible drop in sales. Steven’s rule: “If you don’t need 100 robots, then we’re not gonna do it.”
UNC Health and Mayo Clinic: UNC Health CEO Christy Page greenlit a pilot almost immediately, saying “Pilot tomorrow.” This gave Blue Sky’s engineers a deployment just a five-minute walk away where they could observe the work and iterate in real time. Mayo Clinic followed as a second deployment and potential investor.
A 16-person team built on Triangle talent: Blue Sky now has 16 employees and draws heavily from UNC for computer vision, NC State for mechanical engineering, and Duke’s Fuqua School for business talent. Several interns and fellows stayed with the company after successful summer experiences.
On co-founders: “Co-founder selection is massively, massively important,” Steven says, comparing the relationship to a marriage built on a commitment to work through both financial and personal challenges together.
As Steven puts it, pride is the enemy of a good pivot, and Blue Sky Robotics has proof that listening to your clients can take you somewhere you never planned to go. Enjoy the conversation.
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