Rehman Merali

Rehman Merali is the Co-Founder and CEO of teaBOT and the CTO and Advisor at Zenblen, a tech-enabled smoothie bar, based in Toronto, Ontario. He established teaBOT in 2013 to develop automated consumer robotics for tea blending and dispensing, successfully leading the two-employee hardware startup through the Y Combinator Summer 2015 batch. Prior to his entrepreneurial ventures, Merali earned a PhD in Robotics with a specialized focus on autonomous space systems and served as a Supervisor at the University of Toronto Robotics Association. His earlier technical career includes software development and mechatronics engineering roles at prominent institutions such as Harvard Medical School, Laurentian University, and ATS Automation Tooling Systems, alongside publishing research on occupancy grid mapping in 2014. Merali currently focuses on advancing consumer-facing automation and mechatronics systems within the food and beverage technology sector.