Summary
Tom Stevens is the co-founder and CEO of Tombot, a robotics and digital health company building Jennie, a lifelike robotic Labrador puppy designed to provide therapeutic companionship for seniors with dementia and others who cannot safely or practically care for a live pet. He launched Tombot in 2017 after his mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis forced the removal of her dog, following an earlier career building and selling a legal-technology company.
Career
Stevens holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from UCLA and a Master of Science in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business, which he completed in 2017 as an MSx Sloan Fellow (LinkedIn; Stanford GSB). Earlier in his career, he served as Executive Vice President of ACT Litigation Services, an e-discovery and document-review company he built together with co-founders Hank Schorz and Jesse Schorz; ACT was acquired by DiscoverReady, a subsidiary of The Dolan Company, in a deal valued at roughly $65 million in 2011 (SEC filing).
Between 2012 and 2017, Stevens served as Chief Investing Officer of TES Investing and, from May 2016 to June 2017, as CEO of Acuity.AI (formerly RealVR), a Stanford-based AI/VR video technology startup (LinkedIn). During this period, Stevens’ mother Nancy was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia, and he had to take away her dog for safety reasons after it became aggressive toward her caregiver — an experience that led him to spend several years researching robotic companion animals as an alternative for people who cannot safely keep a live pet.
In July 2017, Stevens founded Tombot alongside Hank Schorz, who became the company’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, and Jesse Schorz, who became co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (Equilar ExecAtlas). Under Stevens’ leadership, Tombot partnered with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to design Jennie’s animatronics, built a waitlist of more than 23,000 pre-order customers, and raised a $6.1 million Series A round in 2025 and a $7 million Series A extension in 2026 ahead of a planned Fall 2026 commercial launch.
Source Notes
This profile draws on Stevens’ LinkedIn profile, a Stanford GSB alumni feature, a citybiz Q&A, Equilar ExecAtlas executive-bio data, an AI for Good speaker profile, and an SEC filing related to the 2011 acquisition of ACT Litigation Services. His exact birth year is not publicly disclosed in available sources and has been intentionally left blank rather than estimated.