Jeff Robbins

Founder & CEO Cerebre

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Jeff Robbins is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cerebre, a Boston company he started in 2019 that describes its product as context infrastructure for industrial AI. The problem it addresses is specific and widely felt in heavy industry: a refinery or plant generates enormous volumes of sensor data, but the information needed to interpret that data — what equipment exists, how it connects, what a given tag actually refers to — lives in engineering drawings, piping diagrams, and decades of static documents that no analytics system can read. Cerebre builds the connected plant model underneath, so AI systems have something to reason against. Robbins summarizes his own career as a progression through sensors, then data, then context.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Cerebre since 2019, building connected plant modeling for industrial AI.
• Cerebre selected by Chevron Technology Ventures for its Catalyst program in March 2024.
• Former Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence and IoT Strategy at EY, 2017 to 2019.
• Held strategy roles at EY from 2014, including Global Health Strategy, after seven years at Walgreens in market research and corporate strategy.
• Recruited a leadership team including CTO Rob Povey, previously of Microsoft Bing and Maana.

Professional Journey

Robbins studied at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2003 to 2007, then joined Walgreens, where he spent seven years moving from analyst work in market planning and research into corporate strategy, ending as a manager in that function. In 2014 he moved to EY, rising through strategy roles including a period in Global Health Strategy before becoming Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence and IoT Strategy from 2017 to 2019.

That last role put him in contact with a recurring failure pattern across industrial clients. Companies had invested heavily in instrumenting their facilities, building sensor networks and data platforms, and then in AI systems intended to draw conclusions from the resulting telemetry. The systems underperformed, and the reason was not model quality. A sensor reading is meaningless without knowing what it measures, where that equipment sits in the process, and what it is connected to upstream and downstream — and that structural knowledge was locked in engineering documents rather than in any database. The AI had data but no context.

He founded Cerebre in 2019 to build that missing layer. The company ingests engineering documents, piping and instrumentation diagrams, and asset records, and turns them into a connected model of the plant, so that queries and AI reasoning can traverse the actual physical relationships of a facility rather than treating each data stream as an isolated series. Robbins positions this as infrastructure that sits beneath industrial AI rather than competing with it, the layer that makes existing analytics and AI investments usable.

Cerebre has drawn interest from the energy sector, where the problem is most acute: Chevron Technology Ventures selected the company for its Catalyst program in March 2024. Robbins has built out a leadership team with deep enterprise search and industrial knowledge-graph experience, including CTO Rob Povey, who previously worked at Microsoft Bing and at Maana, alongside CRO Lewis Makin and COO Sam Korach.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Gies College of Business

Bachelor’s degree, Business (2003-2007)