Chase Olle

Chase Olle trained as a Mechanical Engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Bachelor of Science in 2013 and a Master of Engineering in Manufacturing in 2014. During his education, he operated as an independent design consultant under the name MonkeyBox Design, where he built prototype hardware for early-stage startups. Projects included variable-resistance free weights, a digital picture frame, and a universal screwdriver, providing early exposure to rapid prototyping, manufacturability, and customer-driven design constraints.

Chase’s first professional role out of graduate school focused on developing a vision-guided robotic arm for automated film transfer of pyrolytic graphite at AvCarb. This work introduced him to unstructured automation challenges, vision-based alignment, and the reliability constraints of industrial robotic systems operating outside of tightly controlled environments.

He later joined Adcole, where his early career centered on high-precision metrology for automotive manufacturers including General Motors, Volkswagen, and Toyota. At Adcole, Chase led R&D projects spanning camshaft and crankshaft measurement systems, 3D optical surface scanning, and high-speed gear profile measurement using air-bearing-based architectures. This work emphasized calibration rigor, repeatability, and field reliability at production scale.

In 2017, Chase transitioned into biotechnology, joining Dale Thomas at Mytide, a peptide synthesis company. His work focused on peptide synthesis workflows and the automation of downstream processing steps. It was during this period that Chase experienced, firsthand frustration with the limitations of existing lab automation technologies. He observed that, relative to automotive manufacturing, biotechnology lagged significantly in flexible, scalable automation.

This experience inspired him to found Robot on Rails.