Elton Shon is Co-Founder and CTO at One Robot, a Y Combinator W26 company building world models for robot evaluation and training.

Elton earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley and spent five years at Tesla, working on factory automation during the Model 3 ramp and on the Dojo supercomputer team. He then became head of software at Industrial Next (YC W22), building robot learning and control systems.

While training robots for sub-millimeter assembly, Elton and co-founder Hemanth Sarabu found that evaluating a new policy took longer than training it. That bottleneck led them to start One Robot.

One Robot was founded in 2025 and is based in San Francisco, with a small team of two. It has raised a seed round, with Tracxn reporting $500K from one investor.

One Robot's platform uses world models to find where robot action policies fail and to generate targeted synthetic trajectories. This helps robotics teams replace thousands of hours of manual data collection.