Jacksonville robotics startup lands contract, opening path to hundreds of U.S. hospitals (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Curabotics, a Jacksonville robotics startup pursuing workforce automation solutions in healthcare, is at an inflection point.
A new contract with Capstone Health Alliance opens a commercial pathway for deployment into hundreds of hospitals nationwide — approximately 100 health systems, 200 hospitals and over 31,000 continuum-of-care providers.
Kate McAfoose and Matthew Chang co-founded Curabotics in March 2025. The startup is a division of Chang Robotics, where McAfoose is president and Chang is founder.
The pitch is simple: stop wasting precious nursing time on mundane delivery tasks and allow robots to handle the heavy lifting. To that end, the company selects and validates technology, engineers its application around a hospital’s workflow before integrating it.
Between an ongoing national nurse shortage and the widespread burnout of health care workers, Curabotics aims to alleviate some of that pressure from workers and put it instead on the backs of robots.
The past year-and-change has been spent proving technology and clinical value.
Curabotics doesn’t have tens or hundreds of deployments yet, McAfoose admitted, but the contract with Capstone gives it the scale it’s been searching for.
“The important part is that we aren’t starting from scratch with every hospital,” McAfoose told the Business Journal.
Their agreement with Capstone establishes contract framework, pricing and terms, removing one of its biggest barriers to deploying the technology.
Through it, Capstone’s members can access the Jacksonville startup’s nurse assist bots — its primary offering. A two-year pilot of the robot at a leading U.S. hospital demonstrated a 15% reduction in nurse workload and 96% adoption rate among nursing staff, according to Curabotics.
Looking toward the company’s second anniversary in the New Year, the leaders of Curabotics aim to spin proof of concept into repeatable deployment across additional health systems.
“I’m less interested in setting an arbitrary robot-count goal than I am in making sure we build the foundation correctly,” McAfoose said, calling it “disciplined scale.”
Workplace systems are a leading cause of burnout among health workers, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which includes excessive workloads and administrative burdens.
Federal authorities projected a shortage of 78,610 full-time registered nurses in 2025 and a shortage of 63,720 full-time registered nurses in 2030, according to a Health Workforce Analysis published by the Health Resources and Services Administration in 2022.
“The bigger vision is essentially an automation ecosystem for the hospital,” McAfoose said, “where physical automation increasingly handles the repetitive logistics work so nurses, pharmacists and other clinical professionals can spend more of their time practicing at the top of their license.”