02:51:03 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Alex Hawkinson
[02:51:03] S0: Airhorn for Casey. [02:51:04] S1: Up next, we have Alex from BrightAI coming in the studio. But let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Interesting. What else do we need to cover today? There are a bunch of posts we've been through but we have our next guest here in the studio. You will welcome him in. How you doing? Welcome. [02:51:30] S0: Hey, welcome. Alex. What's happening? [02:51:32] S1: Hey, guys. [02:51:33] S2: Thanks for having me on. [02:51:34] S1: Yeah. Thanks for hopping on. Give us an intro. Breakdown, who you are, what you do for everyone who's listening. [02:51:41] S2: Yeah. So I'm CEO and founder of BrightAI. We build physical AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without. So things like, energy grid, you know, power supply, water infrastructure, HVAC, pest control, and all those things. So we have a platform that lets you kind of real time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and, solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of, like, labor shortages Yeah. You know, breakdown in the aging infrastructure, sustainability challenges, all those things. [02:52:14] S1: Is the customer more government focused or private companies? [02:52:18] S2: They're private companies now. It sort of touches, touches everything, you know, these these services. I've, obviously, every con everybody alive is a consumer of these things.
02:52:18 · Alex Hawkinson, John Coogan
[02:52:18] S2: They're private companies now. It sort of touches, touches everything, you know, these these services. I've, obviously, every con everybody alive is a consumer of these things. [02:52:28] S1: Yeah. [02:52:29] S2: You know? And as a result of that, there's plenty of government involvement, but, they tend to be owned privately in The US. So big utility companies, service providers, you know, pest control operators, like all different sorts of companies. And then you've got this crossover interest with, you know, the national interest and so on as well. [02:52:48] S1: Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas? Or, like, where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain?
02:52:48 · John Coogan, Alex Hawkinson, Micky Malka, Jordi Hays
[02:52:48] S1: Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas? Or, like, where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain? [02:52:56] S2: It's, it's pretty severe everywhere. So, like, The US has got a you know, if you grade the infrastructure, it's like a c minus or a d. So most of the critical infrastructure was built, you know, just before and after World War two. And it's, like, course, like, typical American plan with a twenty year lifespan. We'll figure it out afterwards. And now it's just you know, in a lot of places, it's, like, really held together with duct tape and and wire. And, so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure, and then you have a labor force, like a systemic labor problems because older, like, older technicians are aging out instead of it's a bigger economy now, I guess. You know? It's still cool work to do, but younger workers are just not signing up for the journey to be a, you know, twenty five year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces. So all of it's, crushing. I mean, to give one example, it'd be like water infrastructure. Like, 30% of the water we clean up leaches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere. Like, my town has wooden pipes, if you could believe that. What? It's crazy. [02:53:58] S8: I mean, it's pipe out [02:53:58] S1: of all. [02:53:59] S0: I know about I know about all the lead pipe that that our country depends upon to deliver water to to homes, which is concerning but wood pipes That feels
02:53:59 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Alex Hawkinson
[02:53:59] S0: I know about I know about all the lead pipe that that our country depends upon to deliver water to to homes, which is concerning but wood pipes That feels [02:54:08] S1: like a good thing. It feels like an aqueduct. I'm I'm down. Give me a wood punch. It's probably safer. I don't know. [02:54:15] S2: It's like I know. It's something a beaver. Don't know but it's it's bad. [02:54:18] S1: Like the [02:54:18] S2: fresh water is leaching out and the bad stuff is leaching in. [02:54:21] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So you're active in a bunch of different industries. Yeah. What is like, what is a go to market been? What is even the sales cycle look like? Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like, we're gonna help you leverage AI and it and it's looks like, you know, kind of Palantir's forward deployed model? Are you doing something different? [02:54:45] S2: Yeah. It's in that zone. I mean, we bootstrapped through the first 100,000,000 in revenue. So it's like I was trying to figure out that that that path path through path to customer. [02:54:55] S0: We need a word for bootstrapping to a $100,000,000 run rate and then and then raising some capital later, but it it it it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's Hawkinson's model, something like that.
02:54:55 · Jordi Hays, Alex Hawkinson, John Coogan, Micky Malka
[02:54:55] S0: We need a word for bootstrapping to a $100,000,000 run rate and then and then raising some capital later, but it it it it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's Hawkinson's model, something like that. [02:55:09] S2: There you go. Well, I've I've raised too early a bunch of times before, so I can, like, give warning at the other founders. But believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out. But I had to figure out that go to market. All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms. Mhmm. So it turns out that their, you know, private equity kind of sits and and basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure. And so and they're also very aligned with, like, five to seven year cycles where they wanna drive change, like, big EBITDA growth and change in these in these industries. And so that's where all of our first customers have come from. So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms instead of their their secret weapon for physical AI. [02:55:49] S1: Yeah. What yeah. What's the latest news on the fundraising side? [02:55:53] S2: Yeah. So we we just raised a $51,000,000 a. [02:55:58] S0: Let's go. Congratulations. [02:56:02] S2: Thank you. Yeah. Co led by Khosla Ventures Fantastic. And Inspired Capital. And we picked those guys because, you know, cost Khosla's super badass. They were, you know, the first and earliest check-in OpenAI. They'd lean forward into sort of the future of abundance. [02:56:18] S8: Yeah.
02:56:18 · Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson, Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:56:18] S8: Yeah. [02:56:18] S2: You're e you know, there and then Inspired is, a lot of people don't know about, but at New York based firm, deep they're in infrastructure specifically and super great founder operators, you know, and all that. So it's, it's good. [02:56:31] S0: Do you see do you think the company will always be a software, more of a software provider? Or is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy the and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it, you know, better than other players in the market? [02:56:47] S2: It's a good question. You know, we provide a lot of software and hardware today. So our platform combines [02:56:51] S1: IoT devices. Yeah. [02:56:53] S2: Yeah. We have, like, sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers, and it ties all this, like, crazy distributed infrastructure into one big, like, physical AI learning loop, if that makes sense. And, we found some industries, like, are more efficient than others, but, like, the most efficient one we found like, give you an example is, like, 50% of the time they send a technician out, there's nothing to see. That's the most [02:57:18] S8: The most efficient one.