FOUNDER PROFILE

     John Lert is both an inventor, with over 75 issued and pending patents, and a serial entrepreneur, with a 50-year career of creating business value through disruptive technology innovation.

     In his second job after receiving his MBA, Lert discovered a talent for envisioning technology solutions to business problems by inventing a computer-based system for tracking television commercials. He sold the invention to A.C. Nielsen (Media) and led the engineering team that created Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the world's first successful automated commercial-monitoring system.

     In the mid-1990s, Lert saw an opportunity to disrupt supermarket industry with automation systems using small mobile robots that could fill orders for cases of merchandise in distribution centers, and perhaps even fill orders for the individual items (“eaches”) that customers currently pick off shelves in supermarkets. In 2007, Lert founded the company now known as Symbotic to develop and commercialize his invention of a robotic case-picking system, in a co-founding partnership with Rob Sullivan, and a strategic funding partnership with the nation’s largest grocery wholesaler. Lert and Sullivan then sold the company to their partner two years later, and that case-picking technology is now being installed in all 42 of Walmart’s U.S. grocery distribution centers.Symbotic is currently valued at nearly $26 billion.

     In 2011, Lert began working on the more challenging problem of robotic each-picking, and in 2016 he founded the company Alert Innovation in a strategic partnership with Walmart. The company’s mission was to develop Lert’s invention of the Alphabot technology for use in Walmart supercenters, enabling those stores to function both as self-service retail facilities and as automated e-grocery fulfillment centers. In 2022, with Alphabot systems rolling out across multiple supercenters, Walmart acquired Alert Innovation and subsequently rebranded the team as Walmart Advanced Systems and Robotics.

     Following the acquisition, Lert entered into a new phase of creative invention across diverse application domains. In 2024, he and Rob Sullivan came together again in a new partnership to leverage their combined talents as inventors, leaders/CEOs/entrepreneurs and create Alert Venture Foundry, a company whose business is to develop innovative technologies and create new companies to commercialize them.