Former Cruise Execs Join Diligent Robotics’ C-Suite

A pair of executives from General Motors’ shuttered robotaxi division were added to Diligent Robotics' C-suite this week. Rashed Haq, who served as Cruise’s VP, Head of AI and Robotics, has been named CTO; while Cruise’s former COO, Todd Brugger, will maintain that job title at the Austin-based robotic healthcare firm.

GM began winding down Cruise at the end of 2024, after determining that the expenses of running an autonomous taxi service weren't tenable. After pouring $10 billion into the division, the automaker closed Cruise down, while folding its self-driving technologies into existing projects.

The move, which was announced in tandem with plans to scale back EV development, marked a major shift in how GM is approaching forward looking technologies. In 2023, CEO Mary Barra bullishly predicted a future $50 billion revenue for the brand. A year later, the executive bemoaned Cruise’s costs, noting, “You've got to really understand the cost of running a robotaxi fleet, which is fairly significant, and again, not our core business.”

GM laid off roughly half of Cruise’s headcount in February, followed by dozens more in the intervening months as operations are being wound down. Thankfully for many of the division’s top performers, much of the work done in automotive autonomy is transferable to robotics. The stakes are also significantly lower for a small robot vs. a multi-ton self-driving car carrying human passengers.

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Both Cruise and Diligent were founded in 2016. Over the space of nine years, the robotics firm has had considerably less friction in terms of scaling and deployment, however. In February, the Diligent celebrated its Moxi nursing robot’s one millionth delivery. In this sense, the company has a significant head start over a humanoid robot field that’s largely stuck in pilot mode.

Brugger points to Diligent’s pragmatic focus on productizing as a key motivator in his decision to join the company. That’s not entirely unexpected from an executive who spent his recent career in autonomous driving, a space that sometimes appears to be perpetually spinning its wheels.

“From spending my career helping new technologies make the leap from R&D to real-world deployment, it’s clear that AI and robotics are at a historic inflection point,” Brugger says in a release tied to the news. “Diligent stood out because of their focus on execution over R&D. I’m excited to help scale what they’re already doing — earning trust, ensuring safety, and creating feedback loops from deployments to engineering.”

Catch Diligent CEO Andrea Thomaz at A3's Humanoid Robot Forum in Seattle on September 23.