Bloomberg reports that two former Apple execs have joined Bumblebee Spaces Inc., a smart home startup that meshes home furnishings with robotics.
The San Francisco-based company has appointed Steve Zadesky as a board member and hired Nick Forlenza as a strategic adviser, according to CEO Sankarshan Murthy, a co-founder.
Zadesky worked at Apple for more than 20 years and oversaw the engineering of several iPod and iPhone models. For two years he oversaw “Project Titan,” the secretive “Apple Car” project. He resigned form Apple in January 2016.
Forlenza left the tech giant in February 2020. He had served as vice president of Manufacturing Design.
The two high-profile hires join Rico Zorkendorfer, a former member of Jony Ive’s Apple industrial design team who began work last year as the startup’s lead design adviser. Zorkendorfer left Apple in 2019. He had been a member of Apple’s Industrial Design team for 15 years.
Bumblebee Spaces describes itself as a company that “creates a new way to live by thinking about space in cubic feet instead of square feet.” The company multiplies usable space by using modular robotics systems to store and retrieve objects in the ceiling. Using smart robots and an AI stack, the company says it increases usable space and reduce footprint by storing, managing, and retrieving objects on-demand in your ceiling.
