Justin Gross

Finance Executive · Robotics, Industrial Automation & Physical AI

Five years at Humatics Corporation, a Series B company building precision positioning for industrial robots, the last two running the whole finance function on my own. Executed more than $17M of insider financing and cut the close from two weeks to under two hours with software I built. Open to full-time CFO and VP Finance roles, as well as interim and fractional work.

Experience

Capital: Executed more than $17M of insider bridge and convertible note financing, full lifecycle from term sheet through post-close cap table reconciliation.
Cost structure: Rebuilt the cost structure across payroll, vendors and outside counsel, cutting annual cash burn by nearly two-thirds.
Cap table: Ran equity administration end to end, with Carta as system of record, grant issuance, 409A cycles, and preference stack and waterfall analysis.

M&A: Sourced and ran diligence on buy-side targets across industrial automation and robotics software; built the financial case and mapped the buyer landscape on the sell side.
Automation: Rebuilt month-end close from two weeks to under two hours with an application I built in Claude Code, and led the company-wide AI rollout.
Restructuring: Led the finance workstream of a company-wide restructuring: retired more than 95% of past-due payables through direct negotiation and eliminated an eight-figure liquidation preference in a preferred-to-common conversion.

Working together

Full-time CFO or VP Finance

Permanent

Own the whole function: capital, planning, board and investor reporting, and the systems that keep the close fast as the company scales.

Interim CFO

3 to 9 months

Full scope through a financing, a leadership gap or a restructuring, with a named end date.

Fractional CFO

Ongoing, 10 to 15 hours a week

Board package, forecast, cap table, close oversight and investor communication. Often starts with a 2 to 3 week diagnostic: a 13-week cash model, unit economics, and a written list of what breaks first.

Background

Humatics Corporation

Head of Finance

2021 – 2026

Series B company building precision positioning for industrial robots. Progressed from Senior Accountant through Director of Finance to Head of Finance, sole finance employee from 2024. Capital, equity administration, board reporting, corporate development, and restructuring.

Shorelight Education

Corporate Accountant

2020 – 2021

Owned the monthly close and rebuilt it end to end; identified and resolved a control failure that materially reduced audit scope and cost.

Marriott International

Finance Leadership Development Program

2018 – 2020

Rotational program tracking to Assistant Director of Finance. Supervised four accountants and built reporting infrastructure.

How I work

Robotics companies don't behave like software companies, and most finance playbooks assume they do. Cost-to-serve when every deployment is bespoke. Hardware, software and installation revenue tangled together in one contract. Integrator-led versus direct, and which one actually scales. Pilots that look like pipeline and aren't. Those are the models worth building.

I've done every job in the function myself. I'll build the model, run the close, write the board package, and take the call with counsel. I'd rather tell a board something inconvenient early than manage a narrative.

Most months this is a visibility job. But I have also run a company through a restructuring and a preferred-to-common recapitalization, so if a year does go sideways, the cap table, the creditors and the runway math are familiar ground rather than a crisis I'm learning on. Worth knowing even if you never need it.

Outside of work: moving to Montana this winter, a year in Madrid learning Spanish properly, surfing whenever there is something worth paddling out for, and more time than is reasonable spent automating things that used to take two weeks.

Credentials

MBA, Digital Innovation
EDHEC Business School, Nice

B.Sc., Finance
University of Central Florida

Sustainable Finance, United Nations
Emerging Technologies, IBM
Bloomberg Market Concepts