#290 Grace Brown: The 26-Year-Old Challenging Silicon Valley's Robotics Giants With a Radically Different Vision for AI

Andromeda's Abi brings companion robots to aged care

Andromeda Robotics is betting that social intelligence, not physical capability, is the hard part of humanoid robots. Its robot Abi is leased to aged care homes, where loneliness is severe and few companies are building, and Brown argues that body language and memory are what let a machine become a companion. Physical intelligence she expects to commoditise, and she thinks the values of the teams that build robots end up inside them.

Takeaways

• Andromeda bets on social, not physical, intelligence. Brown says Abi's edge is the social operating system of body language, gaze and memory, and expects physical intelligence to become commoditised. Care homes lease Abi yearly for group activities such as tai chi and trivia.
• Loneliness makes aged care the market to serve. The WHO finds loneliness has health effects comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and older adults are worst affected. Brown picked aged care because few companies build for it, and residents describe Abi as a best friend or a grandchild.
• The round's real unlock was people. Yuri led the round and grasped how significant the vision is after very few conversations. Brown says the resources mattered less than the people, who shaped her worldview and her belief in the business.
• She hires for belief over experience. Brown's executives are about twenty years older but feel like peers. She asks reports not to let the cynicism of experience flow through them and avoids hiring people who want to show her how things are done.
• Robot builders' values end up in robots. Brown argues the culture of a nation and its developers gets built into their products. She notes China's lead in hardware manufacturing, and says the industry agrees robots will be everywhere but splits on timing, from two years to over a decade.
• She refused Amazon's advice, then hired the advisers. Pitching Amazon's robotics team as a student, Brown was told to build a simpler wheeled robot with far less functionality. She refused, and later hired some of those engineers.

How Abi got built

1. A tenth-grade engineering class had her build a robotic arm. She calls it the turning point that made her decide to do engineering for the rest of her life.
2. Reading about Swoop Aero, an Australian drone company, showed her venture-backed robotics startups could be built at home rather than only in Silicon Valley.
3. She started building Abi in 2020 from Melbourne student accommodation during COVID lockdowns, after months without meaningful social interaction, using 3D printing and the open-source Poppy Humanoid as a starting point.