Summary
John Ha is the founder and CEO of Bear Robotics, a company that develops autonomous mobile robots for restaurants, hotels, and commercial facilities. Ha founded the company in May 2017 after experiencing the physical demands and operational challenges of running a restaurant firsthand while working as an engineer at Google. Bear Robotics has since deployed over 16,000 service robots globally and became a subsidiary of LG Electronics in January 2025 following LG’s majority stake acquisition.
Career
Ha holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where his research focused on distributed Java virtual machine systems, and a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University. Before founding Bear Robotics, he served as a technical lead and senior software engineer at Google, where he worked on Java Virtual Machine performance optimization. He also worked as a research scientist at Intel Corporation and served as an adjunct professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
While working at Google, Ha invested in and operated Kang Nam Tofu House, a Korean restaurant in Milpitas, California. His original plan was to enjoy restaurant ownership casually, but reality proved far more demanding. Ha found himself walking five to eight kilometers per day serving food, bussing tables, and washing dishes while constantly struggling with hiring, retention, and the inability to offer employees health insurance despite low wages and physically grueling work.
In 2016, after working late nights, Ha developed a simple self-driving robot prototype that could deliver food across the restaurant floor. The immediate impact on revenue, tip rates, and employee retention convinced him this was a solvable problem. In May 2017, Ha left Google and founded Bear Robotics with three co-founders—Fangwei Li, Juan Higueros, and Brennand Pierce—with a mission to allow restaurant workers to spend more time on hospitality and customer interaction while robots handled repetitive physical tasks.
Under Ha’s leadership, Bear Robotics raised approximately $175 million from investors including SoftBank Robotics, LG Electronics, IMM Investment, and Cleveland Avenue. The company launched its mass-production Servi robot in 2020 and rapidly scaled deployments across the United States, South Korea, and Japan, partnering with major chains including Chili’s, Denny’s, Marriott, and Compass Group. By March 2022, Bear had deployed over 5,000 robots, and by mid-2026, that number had grown to over 16,000 units.
In January 2025, LG Electronics acquired a 51% controlling stake in Bear Robotics, making it a subsidiary while keeping Ha and his management team in place. Ha continues to lead the company’s expansion beyond restaurant service into autonomous cleaning, warehouse automation, and humanoid manipulation following the acquisition of Kinisi Robotics in June 2026.
Ha has stated his core philosophy is that robots should quietly empower human workers rather than replace them, describing Bear’s robots as “sidekicks” designed to be unobtrusive and supportive, similar to R2-D2 in Star Wars—functioning in the background to get things done without drawing attention.
Source Notes
This profile draws from John Ha’s LinkedIn profile, TechCrunch interviews, Ha’s own Medium articles, and coverage from Startup Selfie and Korea JoongAng Daily. Educational background and career timeline are sourced from Ha’s LinkedIn and publicly available biographical information. The Kang Nam Tofu House restaurant story and motivation for founding Bear Robotics are documented in multiple interviews with Ha conducted by TechCrunch, Medium, and other outlets between 2018 and 2020.