Meet Nexterity: The Startup Automating the Backbreaking Work of Industrial Pipefitting

Lindsey Elliott is exceptionally passionate about bolts. At last year’s 13th annual Bolting Symposium, she recalls that the absolute highlight of the event was participating in a spirited game of “Bolting Bingo” alongside a room full of self-proclaimed “torque dorks.”

While games and playful nicknames lightened the mood, the underlying subject matter of the symposium addresses a critical, heavy-duty industrial challenge. Elliott, a former engineer and planner at energy giant ExxonMobil, has spent years thinking deeply about how to improve the sprawling infrastructure that moves oil, gas, and petrochemicals across North America and beyond. Eventually, her focus narrowed down to a single, ubiquitous component: the bolts that securely connect sections of industrial pipe, technically known in the engineering world as bolted flange joints.

These heavy-duty fasteners require intense physical labor to loosen and tighten, making them a primary source of chronic injuries among pipefitters and industrial maintenance crews. Furthermore, like many traditional trade and manufacturing industries, the sector is currently grappling with a persistent and severe labor shortage.

“Those people get really tired when they’re asked to work 12 hours a day for three months in a row,” Elliott told TechCrunch. “I’ve talked to pipefitters across the U.S. across Canada, and just repeatedly have been told North American pipefitting productivity is notoriously low.”

Out of these stark industry realities, Elliott devised a practical solution. As the founder of startup Nexterity—which has been selected as one of the Startup Battlefield 200 companies participating in TechCrunch Disrupt—she has developed a remote-controlled robot specifically designed to shoulder this grueling part of the job. It represents the kind of transformative idea that could fundamentally alter the day-to-day reality of a vital blue-collar profession if it sees widespread adoption, simultaneously boosting worker safety and operational productivity.

In short, Elliott’s vision for the future of industrial maintenance can be summed up with a simple industry mantra: more dork, less torque.

The specialized robot is ingeniously designed in two main pieces that fit seamlessly around a pipe. Powered by reliable onboard batteries, the autonomous or remote-controlled device can effortlessly slide across the pipe once attached, rapidly and precisely loosening and tightening four bolts simultaneously.

Elliott noted that Nexterity has successfully developed several different configurations of the robotic system to accommodate various standard pipe sizes. Despite their robust mechanical capability, every model is compact enough to fit snugly inside a standard Pelican case, meaning it can easily be carried and operated by a single worker in the field. This high degree of portability makes the devices exceptionally easy to deploy to fresh job sites—a crucial degree of flexibility that underpins Nexterity’s overarching business model of treating the robots much like rental construction equipment rather than permanent capital purchases.

The path to this particular product design was forged through years of industry engagement and technical discussions. Elliott arrived at the concept not only by attending specialized gatherings like the Bolting Symposium, but also by consulting extensively with members of the Pressure Vessels and Piping Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

“What I learned from the people, the torque dorks per se,” she explained, “is that 80% of our pipes are between two to eight inches in diameter, or what they call NPS2 to NPS8. And so when you have that much repeatability, you have a fantastic candidate for automation.”

While the underlying premise of automating repetitive mechanical tasks is straightforward, Elliott firmly believes the market potential and upside for her startup are immense.

“I think it would shock a lot of people just how big this market is,” she noted. “I mean, day to day, most of us don’t think about piping infrastructure, but even water, wastewater, water treatment, food and beverage, mining, nuclear, any kind of green and sustainable manufacturing facility—they all use the same kind of piping.”