Summary
Lindon Gao is the co-founder and CEO of Dyna Robotics, which builds general-purpose, dual-arm robots powered by a proprietary embodied AI foundation model. A repeat entrepreneur, he previously co-founded smart-cart startup Caper AI, which Instacart acquired for $350 million in 2021.
Career
Gao attended Stuyvesant High School in New York, where he started his first small businesses as a teenager, including a gaming-collectibles trading venture and, by age 19, a crafts business called LPG Crafts that grew into a multi-million-dollar operation. He went on to study Finance and International Business at NYU Stern School of Business, then spent more than two years as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs before deciding he preferred building companies to financial analysis (Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association; Yespress).
In 2016, Gao and a group of co-founders — including York Yang — launched QueueHop, an app-enabled anti-theft apparel tag, through Y Combinator’s W16 batch, raising $150,000 in seed funding. QueueHop itself did not take off, but the underlying problem the founders had identified — friction in physical retail — led them to develop Caper, an AI-powered smart shopping cart that used cameras and weight sensors to let shoppers skip checkout lines. Caper raised a $10 million Series A in 2019 and deployed its carts at retailers including Kroger, ShopRite, Aldi, and Sobeys in Canada. In October 2021, Instacart acquired Caper for $350 million, and Gao and his co-founders were named to Forbes’ 2020 “30 Under 30” list in Retail & Ecommerce for the product (Wikipedia; Instacart Newsroom).
Following the acquisition, Gao became Vice President and General Manager of In-Store at Instacart, leading the team responsible for digitizing physical grocery stores for chains including Kroger, ShopRite, and Aldi. He left Instacart in 2024 to co-found Dyna Robotics alongside York Yang and former Google DeepMind researcher Jason Ma, aiming to apply the same real-world, deployment-driven approach to AI improvement that he had seen work at Caper — this time to general-purpose robotic manipulation. As Dyna’s CEO, he has led the company through a $23.5 million seed round and a $120 million Series A within roughly six months of each other in 2025, and has been a public voice for the company’s stated goal of building toward “physical artificial general intelligence” (Yespress; PR Newswire).
Source Notes
This profile draws on a Yespress founder profile of Lindon Gao, Wikipedia’s entry on Caper AI, Instacart’s official press release announcing its acquisition of Caper, a Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association profile covering his early ventures, and PR Newswire’s coverage of Dyna Robotics’ 2025 funding rounds. Some early biographical details, including his pre-college business ventures, are drawn from the Stuyvesant alumni profile and have not been independently corroborated elsewhere.