Banks Hunter

Banks Hunter is the Co-founder and CEO of Charge Robotics, a solar construction automation company based in Oakland, California. He established the 25-employee startup in 2021 alongside Max Justicz, securing backing from Y Combinator during the S21 batch. The company develops heavy-duty field robotics to address labor shortages in renewable energy infrastructure and is piloting autonomous assembly machines with SOLV Energy. Prior to this venture, Hunter spent five years at Vicarious Surgical, a medical robotics firm that raised over $450 million, and served as a Firmware Engineer on the Autopilot team at Tesla. He also worked as the second hire at Shaper Tools after graduating with a mechanical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015. His career centers on advancing hardware engineering and deploying specialized robotics across multiple industrial sectors.