James Stevens is the Founder and CEO of Enact, a Y Combinator S26-backed robotics post-training company on a mission to make robot AI models work reliably in the real world.

James studied Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) at Stanford University, where he met his co-founder Govind Chada, and previously served as an early engineer at a startup that scaled from zero to $1.5B AUM.

James identified a critical gap in robotics deployment: that robot foundation models and policies frequently fail outside controlled lab environments, and that targeted recovery data is the key to unlocking real-world reliability.

Together with Govind, James built Enact's in-house data and evaluation operation, running the full improvement loop of rollout, failure identification, targeted data collection, training, and evaluation.

Enact is already serving its first customers across sectors including industrial kitting, lab automation, and electronics recycling, achieving over 99% task success rates using targeted recovery data on controlled packing benchmarks.