00:08:52 · Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce
[00:08:52] S4: But when you talk about early adopters, you you literally mean somebody having a robot in their house, folding the sheet? I mean, what what where are we on early adopters? What does that mean? [00:09:00] S9: Yeah. I think the home is is pie in the sky. You know? I see a lot of these startups in Silicon Valley is like, we're gonna do home robotics. You can't even, you know, work in a kitchen and do do dishes in a in, like, a Denny's or something like that, let alone actually in anyone's house. I think it's just like the incrementalism would be like, work in a factory is very structured. Can you do subassembly? So go go to a shelf, take the parts off, do the subassembly, put it in a box, and very repeatable. This is where we're doing pilots at the moment because it's... It takes a lot of time, like, a couple of months to set this up so it's actually working very reliably. We're getting up to, like, 98, 99% accuracy and repeatability, but that isn't what an actual factory worker or company wants. They want 99.99 uptises. It's trying to get that percentage up so it's actually doing useful work. And I think you've gotta have to go into the factory, in the warehouse, these sorts of tasks before you can actually start going out into more real world environments, let alone actually doing this task around people and being safe.
00:09:00 · Brennand Pierce, Katie Prescott
[00:09:00] S9: Yeah. I think the home is is pie in the sky. You know? I see a lot of these startups in Silicon Valley is like, we're gonna do home robotics. You can't even, you know, work in a kitchen and do do dishes in a in, like, a Denny's or something like that, let alone actually in anyone's house. I think it's just like the incrementalism would be like, work in a factory is very structured. Can you do subassembly? So go go to a shelf, take the parts off, do the subassembly, put it in a box, and very repeatable. This is where we're doing pilots at the moment because it's... It takes a lot of time, like, a couple of months to set this up so it's actually working very reliably. We're getting up to, like, 98, 99% accuracy and repeatability, but that isn't what an actual factory worker or company wants. They want 99.99 uptises. It's trying to get that percentage up so it's actually doing useful work. And I think you've gotta have to go into the factory, in the warehouse, these sorts of tasks before you can actually start going out into more real world environments, let alone actually doing this task around people and being safe. [00:10:05] S4: So that sort of work is is five years away, but still we have advanced so much from where you started out getting those deliveries from Japan building your little mini robot. Just tell us about that journey and Bear Robotics and and what you're doing now. How did you go from those mini robots to considering putting your robots in factories?
00:10:05 · Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce, Danny Fortson
[00:10:05] S4: So that sort of work is is five years away, but still we have advanced so much from where you started out getting those deliveries from Japan building your little mini robot. Just tell us about that journey and Bear Robotics and and what you're doing now. How did you go from those mini robots to considering putting your robots in factories? [00:10:26] S9: Yeah. Because when I finished my master's in in robotics, I looked out into the field, wanted the job, didn't want to stay in academia. But at the time, it's just like factory arms. It was very boring. So I spent the next, like, I eight years in academia at Carnegie Mellon, Technical University of Munich, really working on humanoid robots, getting them to just walk and, you know, balance. And some people even trying to get them just to stand on a skateboard was was bleeding edge like ten years ago. About ten years ago, I looked at the field. I wanted to go back and do another startup. There was a lot of people I knew setting up like Fetch Robotics and a lot of these companies. I would have loved to do a humanoid robot, but back then, it's very impractical. So I went to use a lot of my research in, like, navigation, SLAM, things like that, and actually founded Bear Robotics, which was doing delivery in restaurants. So that was just doing a very mundane, repeatable task. You take the food out of the kitchen, put it on the robot, it takes it to the table. We've been doing that now about nine years, shipped like 16,000 robots, and [00:11:28] S8: doing very well. Where?
00:11:28 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce
[00:11:28] S8: doing very well. Where? [00:11:30] S4: Is it is that not... And is it a novelty thing? [00:11:32] S8: No. It's... Yeah. Where where is it? Where is it? Where [00:11:35] S9: are the I think it's a very... Going back to... I think it's a cultural thing. We sell them all in Asia. [00:11:41] S4: Right. [00:11:41] S9: Like, I think that is where the big dominant Japan, Korea, they love it. America, the up teeth is a lot more. Europe, no one buys it. It's it's just a culture no one thinks about. We try to sell into here. [00:11:55] S8: Bunch of luddites. [00:11:55] S4: Like like like talking to our waiting staff. It's a profession in most European countries. [00:12:01] S9: Yeah. We've been we've been trying to get into Nando's for, like, four years, and it'd be a perfect thing where you order at your table anyway on a QR code, and your chicken turns up. But England, well, no one likes it. Apart from my parents are very happy, you know, randomly in Guildford. One of our robots there, and my parents had to go there to try it out. They tell all the wait staff that, you know, their son designed it. All of these robots always in the West get shipped to Japanese and Asian restaurants as well, Koreans.
00:12:01 · Brennand Pierce, Danny Fortson
[00:12:01] S9: Yeah. We've been we've been trying to get into Nando's for, like, four years, and it'd be a perfect thing where you order at your table anyway on a QR code, and your chicken turns up. But England, well, no one likes it. Apart from my parents are very happy, you know, randomly in Guildford. One of our robots there, and my parents had to go there to try it out. They tell all the wait staff that, you know, their son designed it. All of these robots always in the West get shipped to Japanese and Asian restaurants as well, Koreans. [00:12:29] S8: Fascinating. So can you just give, like, the two minute history of your company and what the last few years have been? And and then, again, to kind of Katie's point, talk about, like, what is the environment now in terms of, like... You're running a robotics company. You probably need to raise venture capital. What does the world look like in this world... In this kind of AI boom where everybody's getting excited about AI AI, everything? How does this fit, and is it hard to raise money?
00:12:29 · Danny Fortson, Brennand Pierce, Katie Prescott
[00:12:29] S8: Fascinating. So can you just give, like, the two minute history of your company and what the last few years have been? And and then, again, to kind of Katie's point, talk about, like, what is the environment now in terms of, like... You're running a robotics company. You probably need to raise venture capital. What does the world look like in this world... In this kind of AI boom where everybody's getting excited about AI AI, everything? How does this fit, and is it hard to raise money? [00:12:56] S9: Yeah. So about three years ago, going to some of the robotic conference, I was just blown away by the actual state of robotics. Well, AI to be precise. Finally, you could actually train the robot to do something. So I decided to set up another robot company, Kinesi, very much to follow my passion, which is humanoid robotics, and take these foundational models and actually make them a practical reality. So the last three years, we built a very mature now hardware stack, and only just in the last, I say, year or six months has this software actually come mature enough that you could actually start using it. [00:13:31] S4: Just to translate out of techie speak a little bit, when you say the foundational models, taking what is happening in AI digitally and bringing that into the real world.