The Risk That Defined My Company
- Oct 9
- 3 min read
By Kate McAfoose
President of Chang Robotics and Cofounder of Curabotics
While protecting confidentiality, my team transformed a quiet pilot into a nationwide healthcare robotics rollout and launched a new company.
Every entrepreneur has at least a few moments when the stakes feel impossibly high. For me, it happened when our “cobots” (collaborative robots we designed to support nurses) were ready to move from prototype into hospital environments.
In my company, two of the three partners were raised by mothers who are nurses. Inspired by the desire to use robotics technology to reduce nursing burnout and to make their workloads easier, we had secured a pilot project with a major U.S. hospital network. It was the opportunity we’d dreamed of -- a chance to prove our technology in one of the most respected systems in the country. But there was a giant catch – by contract, the entire program had to remain confidential.
We could make no public announcements. If we slipped up -- or even gave the appearance of violating that confidentiality -- the entire project could have been canceled overnight.
Visibility without Exposure
For a startup, of course, visibility is the lifeblood of growth. For an “ingredient brand” this can be incredibly difficult. Investors, partners, and future customers want proof that your ideas are real and that other customers have been willing to adopt them. But in this case (and in many cases), the customers couldn’t be named.
So how could we showcase our expertise without revealing the client?
We took a risk. Under my leadership, we nominated our project for several major innovation awards. We carefully described the work while omitting every detail that could identify the hospital.
Then we doubled down by writing white papers on the technology itself, to prove the business case and the need, without revealing where it was deployed.
We also built a Robot Studio in partnership with Jacksonville University where students, community members, and other vendors could see our units in action during their final testing. There were no logos and no client names -- just the technology, standing on its own.
The Payoff
Thankfully, our strategy worked. Our cobot program won both a Fast Company Innovation Award and an Inc. Best in Business Award in 2024. Those honors gave us the visibility and credibility we needed without crossing the NDA line.
Meanwhile, inside the hospitals, the impact was undeniable. Cobots had demonstrably lightened the load for nurses, reduced burnout, and freed up time for the work they found most fulfilling – the time spent in face-to-face patient care. What started as a quiet pilot became a full-scale implementation across the hospital network and is now available for any other health facility as well.
That success laid the foundation for Curabotics, our healthcare-dedicated company I now lead, dedicated to expanding robotics and AI-driven automation into every corner of healthcare: from elder care to surgical teams to outpatient clinics.
Lessons Learned
Looking back, I think about the risk we took. Had we been careless (or had we offended our client inadvertently) we might have lost everything we’d invested. But by balancing our boldness with careful discipline, we managed to earn the recognition we needed without betraying our customer’s trust.
That experience shaped my leadership philosophy in some valuable ways:
I learned that constraints can drive creativity. Having to keep a lid on the client forced us to find new ways to tell our story.
I learned that trust is non-negotiable. In healthcare, especially, once you lose credibility, you can’t get it back.
I learned that courage matters. Playing it safe would have kept us invisible. But taking a calculated risk allowed us to step into the spotlight in a responsible way.
Thankfully, this risk helped us to propel an entire industry forward, and it helped to launch both Chang Robotics and the new Curabotics venture into the national spotlight.
Most importantly, it helped us to honor the people who inspired this journey in the first place – the nurses like my mother, whose work deserves to be supported, celebrated, and sustained.
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