Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:02:14 · Alexa von Tobel, Steven Simoni
[00:02:14] S0: We love you for that. We take that seriously. Okay, in plain English, let's just start with your background. Steve, who are you? [00:02:22] S1: Well, I'm a kid from small town Pennsylvania, like 2,500 person town, up Stewartstown, PA. Joined the Navy to pay for college and was electrical engineer. So I was, like, always a little nerdier growing up and always was into robotics. I mean, that's that's, like, kind of the core of where it is. I mean, that's why dbot was a robotics company first before we pivoted, and that's why ACS is a robotics company. It's a common thread. And in the Navy, I worked on nuclear reactors. So those were kind of like big robots. [00:02:53] S0: How'd you meet your two cofounders? [00:02:55] S1: So Luke, Allen, I met in the Navy the first day of the Navy. And actually, it's a really funny story where... I I remember the story. My old boss in the Navy told me this, but I talked to him for, like, nine minutes at his cubicle. Sort of like in a cubicle farm. It's nuclear engineering, so I was very serious. And I, like, nine minutes into the convo, I started running around the office screaming, I'm gonna get rich off this guy. I recognized... And maybe I'm the original VC. I recognize I recognize that 21 years old... This sounds like a 21 year old me, by [00:03:26] S0: the way. It's... I better make... I'm tracking this perfectly.
00:03:26 · Alexa von Tobel, Steven Simoni
[00:03:26] S0: the way. It's... I better make... I'm tracking this perfectly. [00:03:28] S1: And I I like... I saw him and I just... I was like, I know this guy's a genius. And I knew he was a better electrical engineer than me, and I'm a very competitive person. So I was like... I told him when I was younger, was like, whatever you make, I'll sell, bro. I'm gonna stop being an electrical engineer after I met him. Because he's just like 10 x better than me at it. Yeah. And then my other cofounder, Mike, we met in restaurant tech. So, like, he was the CEO of Omnivore, is a restaurant middleware that Beavot integrated with. And we always just liked working with his company. And when he sold his company to Olo, that when we sold to DoorDash, we had the opportunity to bring him on for ACS. And so that's why the three of us are together here. [00:04:02] S0: It is very smart when you know and and recognize exceptional talent. Let's talk a little bit about ACS. What are you guys building in plain English?
00:04:02 · Alexa von Tobel, Steven Simoni, Charlotte Ross
[00:04:02] S0: It is very smart when you know and and recognize exceptional talent. Let's talk a little bit about ACS. What are you guys building in plain English? [00:04:12] S1: Yeah. So we are trying to become the air defense prime. So, like, the one stop shop for all things air defense. So, like, one of our taglines is if it flies, it dies, which we take seriously. Like, if it's in the air, we're shooting it down one way or another. So our flagship product, Bullfrog, is an autonomous... What's called an autonomous weapon station. That's what the military would call it. Basically, it's a robotic gun that can auto target and shoot drones, and and also brown targets as well, which is important for the military's mission set. So that's our first product, but the the vision where we're taking it is all things air defense, targeting the small drones up to the bigger drones. [00:04:50] S0: And then, I was gonna say, going back [00:04:51] S2: to Veeva for a minute, like, you know, obviously, you had a successful exit there. You didn't raise a ton capital efficient business. You got a nice acquisition from DoorDash. Going from restaurant tech to this, walk us through that thought process. [00:05:06] S0: That even seemed like a leap for you.
00:05:06 · Alexa von Tobel, Steven Simoni
[00:05:06] S0: That even seemed like a leap for you. [00:05:07] S1: Not a leap as an electrical engineer. Like, robotics is the same, you know, regardless of the industry, you know, different use cases, but still the same principles of electrical engineering apply across industry. You know, we started in the military, Luke and I. So we had a good kind of landscape of what products and what are being built for the military. So we kind of entered the market, like, with some history. And we saw an opportunity in... Particularly in weapon stations, which hadn't been upgraded since Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. Those Those are the last time those were upgraded. So obviously with the Venture hat on, think opportunity to upgrade that before other companies start doing it is really where we entered the market at. [00:05:48] S0: I want to just quickly step back and really describe the Bullfrog to And keep in mind, I also want to describe, like, how is a war fought these days? And obviously, none of us want war to happen. But if war does happen, you want to protect as many lives as humanly possible. And the bullfrog does that, which I think is a really important part of your mission. But let's just talk a little bit. What is the Bullfrog? And just kind of give everyone a visual.
00:06:16 · Steven Simoni
[00:06:16] S1: Yeah. Starting with the Bullfrog, a couple of questions there. But also, by the way, we're in war right now. It's everywhere, and it's scary. But Bullfrog is a... The core of it is a computer vision tracking software. So it uses modern computer vision techniques as well as original legacy computer vision techniques. So just straight signal processing techniques coupled with modern day neural nets, kind of like a layered computer vision stack to identify and detect, identify, and track targets. So once we have a track of where the target is, imagine a dry... Drone flying in the sky, it's moving laterally or it's moving... Coming at you, like, a constant bearing or something, we detect and and know where that is in three d space. The way we know in three d space where it is is we actually hit it right before we shoot with a laser rangefinder. So we have the distance and position. Wow. And then right then, we... Then Bullfrog will, on on the edge, do a ballistics computation so we know the physics of a bullet, and lead the target in the right amount of lead time based on its speed and fired shot. So it's like, there's basically a lot of math happening all at once on the edge. And this wasn't really possible until, you know, basically, like, NVIDIA Thors came out, like, the the newer NVIDIA cards in 2017, 2018. So, like, you couldn't actually build Bullfrog like this until, you know, about six years ago or seven years ago or so.
00:07:42 · Charlotte Ross, Alexa von Tobel, Steven Simoni
[00:07:42] S2: Like, to kind of maybe go back to your comment on war, obviously it doesn't feel like we're in war. I mean, are and we're where we're on, but doesn't... Say more about what you see out there that maybe we [00:07:56] S0: don't see? [00:07:57] S1: Yeah. Mean, I'm sure it didn't feel like... You know, if you're like a citizen of Rome during the Roman Empire, probably didn't feel like you're in war in Germania. Yeah. But we're in war. You know, the world's at war right now. And wars... We're seeing two very different wars. The Ukraine Russia front of the war has a much different landscape than the Iran war. In the Iran war, what we're learning is kind of how war is changing, especially for, yeah, the American empire, [00:08:25] S0: I [00:08:26] S1: would say, which is that it's all about long range standoff now. You know what standoff is? No. Standoff's like a military term for, like, the distance you wanna engage at. So, like, you can imagine in... I just watched the movie Troy with Brad Pitt. He's hot. They're like fighting sword hand to hand. Yeah. So the standoff's like zero meters. Right. Right. That's who they're fighting. Correct. Yeah. That's not a modern war. No one wants to see the whites of anyone's eyes anymore. Like, you don't wanna actually see the person you're killing. Yeah. So now, especially for The US where we have really no appetite for troop loss at all anymore. Have zero appetite. Wars are now far. [00:09:00] S0: Which is a good thing. Which isn't like a thank god.