Nimo Rotem

San FranciscoB.Sc. Mechanical Engineering, Technion LinkedIn

YPO under 40, 2026 Alien of Extraordinary Ability InventorBook The Israeli Dyson Popular Mechanics

I'm an entrepreneur and industrialist. I invent tools, and I build the companies and the factories that make them.

I've started companies in power tools, material handling, consumer products and AI. We never raised venture capital. Each company grew on its own sales into a profitable business, and together they have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade and sold millions of units.

We build what we design in our own factories in China and Vietnam, which employ hundreds of people directly, and we sell it all over the world.

The GRABO assembly line.

Companies

Nemo Power Tools

Co-founder, 2012. nemopowertools.com

Nemo makes cordless power tools that work underwater. They were the first of their kind, and divers, marine crews and pool builders use them all over the world. Popular Mechanics once tested the drill and the grinder in a bathtub.

A diver running a red Nemo drill on the sea floor — A Nemo drill underwater, and a batch on the line.

Rows of red and black Nemo drills on the assembly line — A Nemo drill underwater, and a batch on the line.

Nemo underwater drill — Some of the range: a drill, an impact driver, a grinder, a rotary hammer, a saw and a hull cleaner.

Nemo underwater impact driver — Some of the range: a drill, an impact driver, a grinder, a rotary hammer, a saw and a hull cleaner.

GRABO

Inventor and co-founder, 2019. grabo.com

The idea for GRABO came to me on a climbing trip. I wanted something that could grab onto a rough rock wall. It turned into a handheld vacuum lifter with its own battery-powered pump. Unlike a suction cup, it holds on to textured stone, wood and drywall, not just glass.

Today GRABO is a $100 million brand with 150 employees. We sell it around the world under the GRABO name, and we license it to some of the world's biggest power tool brands and build it for them.

The yellow DEWALT GRABO lifter — DEWALT GRABO

The red and black FLEX VLP 18 GRABO lifter — FLEX GRABO

The black GRABO PRO with its vacuum readout — GRABO PRO

The GRABO HighFlow lifter on its square pad — GRABO HighFlow

VACDRILL

Inventor. vacdrill.com

A cordless drill that holds itself to the wall. It grips concrete, brick, stone and glass by vacuum, then drives a rotary hammer to the same depth every time, perfectly straight, with no one holding it.

Showing it at a trade show.

Other inventions

A mother holding a blue Lifewand over her choking son's mouth and nose

Lifewand is my invention for clearing the airway of someone who is choking. Anyone can use it, and it saves lives all over the world.

A full-face respirator mask connected by a hose to a blower unit

PaPro is a life-saving powered respirator that enriches the air with oxygen. I designed and manufactured it during COVID, and we sold and donated it by the container to several countries in Central America.

A red and black D-Dart blaster with its ring-shaped dart drum

D-Dart is a one-handed automatic dart blaster. It was a best seller at Target two years in a row.

GizmoMaker

Founder. gizmomaker.co.il

Israel's leading physical product development firm. I founded it while I was still a student at the Technion. It runs the GizmoMaker Inventors Un-Conference, where hundreds of inventors, makers and investors meet to show prototypes and trade ideas, and it is a hub for innovators.

The GizmoMaker Inventors Un-Conference.

Other companies

Mecbit, a leading innovator in 3D printing software and a hub for prototypes. It was my first exit, acquired in 2013.
AlphaBell, a research lab working on AI that improves AI.

Where we are

Shenzhen, ChinaWholly owned factory and R&D center
Huizhou, ChinaWholly owned factory
Hong KongNemo Power Tools office
Near Hanoi, VietnamGRABO and DEWALT joint factory
Saigon, VietnamVIETFAB office
Jakarta, IndonesiaGRABO Indonesia
Colombo, Sri LankaAlphaBell
IsraelGizmoMaker
Berlin, GermanyLemad Technologies
Las Vegas, NevadaGRABO USA
San Francisco, CaliforniaSoMa ProtoLab

Factories

Engineering, assembly, testing and shipping all happen under one roof, so the people who design a product work a few steps from the people who build it.

An engineer working in CAD next to a disassembled GRABO — Engineering

Workstations on the assembly floor — Assembly

A technician checking finished lifters on test racks — Testing

Pallets of boxed products ready to ship — Shipping

Team

None of this happens without the team: engineers, assemblers, testers, buyers, and the people in logistics, sales and support.

The team on an outing behind a Nemo Power Tools banner

The Nemo team gathered outside the factory

Ribbon cutting with confetti under the Nemo Power Tools sign

Tug of war on the turf at the annual gala

USA

Our American company is in Las Vegas. The team there handles sales, marketing, customer support and warranty, runs the warehouse, and gives products a second quality check after they arrive from the factory.

Nimo with five members of the US team at a GRABO trade show booth

A selfie in the Las Vegas office under a large American flag

The Las Vegas warehouse, with a GRABO banner and an American flag on the wall

Some things I've learned

Start with a market small enough to own.
- A product a few thousand professionals can't work without is worth more than one that millions think is nice. Win there first, then expand.
Look for the problems an industry has stopped noticing.
- Old industries are full of them. They stay unsolved because they look boring, not because they are hard.
The invention is the easy part.
- What competitors can't copy is the stack behind it: the factory, the suppliers, the dealers, the patents and the people. Each one gets built to solve a problem the last one created.
Early adopters are not the market.
- They forgive rough edges. Everyone after them wants a complete product, a dealer nearby and spare parts in stock. Most hardware companies die in the gap between the two.
Distribution is half the product.
- A great product people can't find is a hobby.
Make it yourself.
- Owning the factory is slow to start and fast forever after. You learn what things really cost and where they fail, and you can change a product in a week instead of a quarter.
Own the outcome.
- A late container or a bad batch is my fault until I've fixed whatever let it happen. Blaming a supplier gives away the only lever I have.
Explain the why, then let people decide.
- A team that understands the goal makes better calls on the floor than I can make from an office.
Grow on what you earn.
- A profitable company sets its own pace. Nobody else gets a vote on how long you have.
A patent buys time, not safety.
- Use the head start to get far enough ahead that copying you isn't worth it.

Now

Lately I run more and more of the companies, and of my own life, through AI agents. They keep the books, file patents, chase shipments, deal with vendors and answer customers, and they write most of the software we use internally. I talked about it in Running my entire life with 200B tokens.

Cartoon in three panels: an idea, a sketch, and a robot filing the patent — Slides from the talk.

Cartoon of rows of robots building apps in a software factory — Slides from the talk.

SoMa ProtoLab

San Francisco. somaprotolab.com · Instagram

ProtoLab is a four-floor loft building in SoMa that I bought so my friends and I would have a place in San Francisco to meet and work. We run events and meetups on robotics, compute, AI and whatever else is interesting, and people come to cowork, show their prototypes and trade ideas.

The ProtoLab building, a three-story facade marked MCMXVIII

Visitors around a humanoid robot in the sunlit loft

Patents

I hold more than 60 patents in the US, Europe, China and Israel, most of them on the sealing and vacuum technology behind our products. They are listed on Google Patents, Justia and InventorBook.

Investments

I've invested in Netlify, Stackbit, Flytrex, Bzigo, Bottomless, Numina Studio, Zellify and Cloud Compiler, and I like helping hardware founders get from prototype to production.

Interviews and talks

2026Running my entire life with 200B tokens, talk
2025Inventing the impossible: building game-changing tools, Founder Reports
2024The GRABO story, NOAH London
2024Innovating industrial tools, Collabs Magazine
2024Five tips for accelerating product ideation and innovation, Authority Magazine
2023“The Israeli James Dyson”, Geekonomy, podcast in Hebrew
2017The power tools that work underwater, Popular Mechanics
2017The original Nemo drill: interview and demo, YouTube
2015Inventors and makers conference, GizmoMaker, talk in Hebrew

Awards

2025Tool Awards, GRABO Pro, Popular Mechanics
2025Tool of the Year, GRABO, Construction Business
2024Innovation Tool of the Year, GRABO, TISE, The International Surface Event
2023Tool of the Year, GRABO, WOOD Magazine
2008Technobrain engineering competition, winner, Technion

About

I studied mechanical engineering at the Technion and have been building hardware ever since. When I'm not working, I fly paramotors and build things in my workshop.

Nimo flying a paramotor next to the Great Pyramid of Giza — Taking off from a beach, then flying past the pyramids of Giza, above the fog in California and over the Columbia River Gorge.

Nimo under his paramotor wing above a bank of fog and forested hills — Taking off from a beach, then flying past the pyramids of Giza, above the fog in California and over the Columbia River Gorge.

Elsewhere: LinkedIn, Crunchbase, InventorBook, Google Scholar.