Building an AI-Native Platform for Industrial Infrastructure Planning: An Interview with Edward Shenderovich, Co-Founder and CEO of Roebling

Hanna: Can you tell us a bit about your professional journey and what led you to the bioeconomy? 

Edward: I’ve spent most of my career building and backing companies that sit at the edge of technology and the real world. Whether it was a marketplace platform for leading ecommerce companies, a food delivery juggernaut, or a flexible office market leader -- all these companies were focused on technology augmenting or enabling real-world processes. I was drawn to industrial infrastructure because it is ultimately responsible for making goods economically. Infrastructure for biomanufacturing was a great place to start -- biology already makes much of what we eat and use; the question is whether we can make new products reliable and economical at scale.

Hanna: Looking back, what was a defining moment that shaped your philosophy as a founder and investor? 

Edward: First and foremost, even in the age of AI — or maybe especially now — people matter. Whether you are a founder or an investor, you are at the mercy of people that surround you, people you are making bets on and people that are making bets on you. A defining realization was seeing how many promising technologies fail not because the science is wrong, but because the infrastructure around them is missing. And people are the core of that infrastructure. Good ideas, even in pursuit of massive markets, die quietly when there’s no path to scale.

Hanna: Can you describe the mission of Roebling and why you believe robust infrastructure is critical today? 

Edward: We started with the idea of making biomanufacturing predictable and repeatable. We launched the company as a development platform for biomanufacturing capacity, aiming to make it standardized and financeable -- basically, a new asset class.  In order to understand and win in this market, we built the largest directory of capacity in the world and the leading platform for techno-economic analysis. This gave us unique insights into what is possible and what challenges are ahead. What we realized is that problems we were seeing in the market, are not isolated to biomanufacturing — they cut across markets, verticals, and all kinds of categories of infrastructure. Work is siloed, processes are disjointed, and economics are not transparent. Every project needs a platform to hold information together — a single source of truth that gets engineers, CapEx managers, and financial analysts on the same page. That lead to the development of Roebling — a system of record for capital projects — a platform that will power how industrial infrastructure is built for the rest of the 21st century. 

Hanna: What are the most exciting technological or scientific advancements you’re currently pursuing at Roebling? 

Edward: We needed to make a few important choices as we were architecting Roebling. On the one hand, we had to understand the relationship Roebling can have with other simulation systems. On the other hand, we needed to ensure that we're not just another wrapper around LLMs prone to disintermediation. The team decided to build our own process model that validates LLM output and translates it into powerful simulations of physical processes using first-principles thermodynamics. We built something unique and continue iterating on it.  

Hanna: What opportunities do you see in industrial planning?

Edward: Industrial planning, and especially capital project development, has not changed in any major way in over a century. Very similar types of output are coming out of engineering firms as we’re coming off engineers’ drafting tables in the 1920s or 1950s. Companies are still utilizing armies of consultants, months of back-and-forth PDF reviews, and disjointed processes that lead to massive overruns, both in terms of time and budgets. These antiquated approaches create massive opportunities for disrupting how the space operates. We’re starting with feasibility and techno-economic analysis, but the opportunity is much bigger — it is around bringing transparency and efficiency to every dollar that’s allocated to physical infrastructure. If you translate it into the language of startups— we want the next generation of hard tech companies to be built as efficiently as software companies.  

Hanna: What’s one leadership lesson you wish you’d known earlier in your career?

Edward: Clarity beats intensity. Working harder is rarely the problem; aligning people around a clear, shared direction usually is. Most confusion in organizations comes from leaders holding complexity in their heads instead of making trade-offs explicit. I think it was Jack Welch, the great CEO of GE, who said that you can never overcommunicate, and I totally subscribe to that mantra. 

Hanna: What book, thinker, or experience has most influenced your way of thinking about innovation?

Edward: I've been fascinated with the idea of leadership and mentorship, and the way the latter has a profound influence on innovation and progress. There are exceptional pairs of scientists and thinkers that have made great impact on our world. One such pair of scientists lived at the dawn of the Greek civilization. They were Thales and Anaximander. Thales was one of the brightest minds that may have ever lived, and Anaximander was his young student who was allowed to question Thales' assumptions. That ultimately led to the idea of science — the idea of questioning. Carlo Rovelli, a terrific scientist and philosopher in his own right, has written an exceptional book on the subject. 

Hanna: Looking ahead, what role do you think Roebling will play in the broader ecosystem, and what is your vision for the company? 

Edward: Our vision and the impact we can make is simple: every R&D endeavor and every industrial project should start in Roebling. It just makes sense. Better planning leads to better outcomes.

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