Key points
- Mytra builds a 700-pound robot that moves 3,000-pound pallets in full 3D, defining warehouses in software.
- CEO Chris Walti says Mytra avoids humanoid moonshots because industrializing legged robots may take decades.
- CTO Ahmad Baitalmal advises founders to work in the field first, and most Mytra staff must work in customer warehouses.
Mytra bets a 700-pound robot can rebuild the warehouse
Mytra is betting the next robotics win is not a humanoid but the pallet. Pallets carry 90% of the world's material movement and have barely changed in a century, and moving one takes a forklift as heavy as the load. A 700-pound robot that moves pallets in three dimensions lets a warehouse be defined in software, and the founders argue hardware teams should work in the field before they build.
Takeaways
- A 700-pound robot moves pallets in 3D. Mytra's system shifts a 3,000-pound pallet up, down, left, right, forward and backward. Because the robot is kinematically unconstrained, the warehouse is defined in software, telling bots to behave like a conveyor instead of building one.
- Pallets carry 90% of material movement. Baitalmal calls pallets the red blood cells of global GDP, and says the technology has barely changed in a hundred years. Moving 3,000 pounds needs a forklift of at least 3,000 pounds, so 9,000 pounds moves to move 3,000.
- Hardware founders should work in the field first. Baitalmal and Walti met as customers of Tesla's material flow systems during the Model 3 ramp. Almost everyone at Mytra, including web developers and marketers, works in a customer warehouse, and Baitalmal built Tesla software while fitting bolts and hoods himself.
- Humanoids are far harder than factory robots. Walti says legged locomotion, grasping and perception are orders of magnitude harder to industrialise than driving a wheeled robot around a factory floor. He is confident humanoids get solved, but cannot say whether that takes one year or thirty, so Mytra avoids research-domain moonshots.
- Software has not reached physical industries. Walti cites Andreessen's line that software eats the world, then notes 85% of GDP comes from physical industries while 90% of tech value came from software. The Internet of Things returns signal but still needs people to act on it.
- Mytra keeps founders deep in technical detail. Walti says he and Baitalmal must stay close to the technical work at 74 people, and that need does not end. He recalls Musk holding about 12 meetings a day at Tesla but says that style is not what Mytra will do.
How Mytra started
- Walti joined Tesla in 2014 and led product and hardware for the Supercharger team, launching products including paid supercharging.
- Tesla handed his integrated robotics team a humanoid program despite having no humanoid expertise. He recruited outside experts and got a robot walking within Musk's three-month mandate.
- He left the robot after about a year.
- Baitalmal joined Tesla in 2014 and later went to Rivian to help scale manufacturing systems.