[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] there's always been an innovation economy and jp morgan has an entire business dedicated to helping it thrive by bringing together founders startups investors and ideas jp morgan's commercial bank helps empower thousands of high growth companies companies that are shaping the present and the future with tailored banking solutions on the global business network jpmorgan helps innovators scale for today and tomorrow visit jpmorgan.com forward
slash startups to find out how they can help you build your future products and services of jpmorgan chase and company and its affiliates are subject to availability eligibility and applicable terms and policies jpmorgan chase bank n a member fdic hello everybody this is techcrunch live where we help founders build better venture-backed businesses i'm bryan heater the hardware editor at techcrunch going in for matt burns who is out this week to teach a bunch of campers the magic of totline hitc
hes uh as you may know we're exactly eight days away from techcrunch's big robotics event so what better time to bring together a leading robotics firm and one of their key investors i'm very excited today to introduce our two panelists scott gravel is the founder and ceo of inventory management robotics firm antibiotics yuri kim is a general partner at 4runner ventures who are an early investor in startups they both have some really fantastic stories that i'm excited to dig into over the course
of the next hour or so during today's events uh we will also be digging into antibiotics's series a pitch deck and discussing why the heck anybody would invest in a robotics firm let alone actually start one it's uh it's an extremely arduous task but if you've got the right ideas people and i assume a lot of luck it can be a wildly fulfilling one as well and our panelists will be happy to discuss that uh we will also go through some of these struggles and successes of the early days of the comp
any and how the landscape has shifted since antibiotics was founded uh this is our second week on our new platform you can register right now on grip and it will make it much easier to register and attend a future tcl and techcrunch events including next week's robotics event which i'm legally obligated to mention five or more times in the next week or so we are also streaming on twitter facebook and youtube but uh please register on grip where you can actually ask questions of the panelists and
network with other attendees the link is over on techcrunch.com and it should be all in all of the other platforms as well uh we also just made it easier to pitch practice just fill out the form uh on grip and you'll be added to the list somebody will contact you if you're selected we have a number of great robotics events lined up over the course of the next week tonight at 5 00 p.m eastern time so exactly an hour after this ends i'm going to be speaking with ohio state university's dean of en
gineering ayanna howard and littlebits founder and e14 partner aya badeer on monday at 3 p.m we'll be hosting a twitter space with irobot co-founder colin engel and of course thursday the 21st is our all-day robotics event featuring conversations with the u.s labor secretary and victor d kayman executives from boston dynamics amazon and many many more it's a totally free event and you can register on the site right now okay with all of that out of the way i'm excited to bring scott and yuri on t
hank you both for being here today thanks brian thanks i'm i'm excited to have the chat yeah so um we'll dig into the as i said before we'll dig into the series a pitch deck in a bit um but but you're actually i want to start with a question around that as uh before we look at it how much of a role if any does a presentation like a slide deck ultimately play in your decision to invest in a company like antibiotics the slide deck itself doesn't necessarily play a role other than to help frame wha
t the opportunity is and there are some founders who can come and in an organized way just spitball the entire story from start to finish but at that same time we're trying to process information we're trying to understand listen remember you know contact set like all at the same time and it's helpful just to have a slide to say hey if i'm going to talk about the market here's a slide on the market just so that you have a couple other data points but you know the presentation's not getting the d
eal done it's certainly just facilitating you being able to tell that story better so scott the last time we spoke he said something that's really stuck with me over the past few days you said that you spent two years trying to find a reason not to do antibiotics it's it's that specifically is not something that i hear from a lot of founders and i've been trying to figure out uh over the course of the last few days whether that's because it's uncommon or because you're uncommonly transparent abo
ut that uh maybe both um [Music] antibiotics is my second business the first one struggled for five years and we shut it down um and failure coming back from failure of some kind is always the biggest challenge so when i had this idea and my old business i don't know you could actually see it leaning against the wall i used to build longboard skateboards um plug for a product that's no longer available um collector's item exactly yeah it's um [Music] when i was trying to sell five thousand dolla
rs with the skateboards to a skate shop that's a very very different problem than trying to sell multi-million dollar automation solutions to fortune 500 companies and so the idea of starting this business scared the crap right out of me um and i actually literally went looking for a reason not to do it but i wouldn't let one of those reasons be that i was afraid there had to be a reason the ip wasn't defensible the technology didn't work wouldn't work the customers didn't want it there was no p
lace for it didn't have proper market fit you know wouldn't bring value so i went and spent two years trying to find those reasons and i never did so i guess the lesson in this is spend some time validating your idea because you only have so many chances to get it right and if you pivot too many times and run out of money there goes the opportunity so did a lot of that diligence on the front end and now it was out of fear out of fear of failure out of fear of not not having the right idea at the
right time um but i wouldn't let fear be the reason not to do it yuri as scott alluded to he comes from a a very unique background you know both in the startup world generally but you know in in robotics specifically um how how important is that sort of robotics pedigree when you're looking at an early stage founder you know i'll actually piggyback off of what scott just talked about because so many founders today want to start their companies because they want to start a company and they're lo
oking for a problem to solve and any problems good enough if it stands up to a pitch deck and maybe you know a couple of friends not laughing at you when you run the idea by them and scott just was so passionate about what the problem was out there and we understood the problem because at 4runner we focus on the modern consumer and commerce landscape and in 2018 when we invested it was still very early days where retailers and brands were trying to figure out how they were going to deliver the e
xperience that you know consumers want and that means fast delivery that means cheap delivery that means all these different things that create a delightful experience that amazon seems to be able to do but nobody else can and so scott came in and pitched the problem that we all know and the solution we all need and in that regard we were we were most impressed with his vision we ended up getting the introduction through a retail partner that he ended up working with um in in those early days fo
r a proof of concept and we leveraged their technology team and sort of inventory and supply chain team to diligence the early concepts but ultimately i wasn't backing a robotics company i was backing a new platform to support modern commerce and however he was going to get that done the vision made a lot of sense and we knew that it was going to take a lot of time to figure out but scott was the person that we wanted to back so at that early stage i mean you know it is ultimately a robotics com
pany it is a company that that builds robotics and that is the solution robots aren't the hard part my friend scott do you want to chime in right there the robots are great they work great we're a solutions we're a solutions company robots are part of the solution but the broader solution is rethinking supply chain changing legacy installed infrastructure to match modern consumer behavior it's change management it's racking in bins and real estate it's it's people it's wms software yeah you know
yes software yes software integration integrating your front end consumer experience with now data analytics tools on your back end supply chains have always been you know excuse the expression but the bastard stepchild of every organization you know that that the front end became very easy for retailers to create a buying experience and supply chains have struggled to live up to that expectation now set by the digital experience the consumers got so yes we build robots but we build robots as p
art of an overall holistic solution to address the challenges of modern commerce fulfillment okay maybe that's the lesson there for the is you know we often get pitched a robotics company or a technology company or a subscription business or whatever you want to call the thing that seems the most kind of the word that you want to use but ultimately what problem are you solving for whom and it's a commerce solution for retailers and brands to serve their customers better and whether you do that f
rom a robot or not a robot it kind of doesn't matter but it's the solution that you need okay so let me rephrase so so a a solution company that that happens to build robots my broader question here though is um you know when you're looking i mean this is kind of a question for both of you actually scott when you are feeling you know that c-level team and you're looking for for partners early on and you know yuri i assume that you know if you're an early stage investor you're playing some role i
n that um you know like what are you looking for in terms of partners you know and and who are the first who are the first people you bring on to the company to to help build out that vision well the first group the first team and i was actually reflecting on this earlier today with the board member of mine were people that could build the technology to a point that proved it worked and but that was just the technology piece you know like the anchor of what we do is geometry and automation um so
who can make that work who can prove that this is viable um then once you move from automation you got to move into intelligence you know and then it's a whole different group to understand you know the software the data the communications you know side of this then it's understanding the consumer and then it's understanding how do we now go from a r d business through commercialization kind of organization and now into an execution company and most of that and most of our focus now on the lead
ership side is around the execution of this how do we manage change management or customers how do we make sure that we keep expectations set how do we manage the project through from initial kind of scoping through completion that you have you demonstrate the value to the consumer um and these are all very different businesses and and not everybody that was great at prototyping is great at executive change management at the organization level and so in the early days i think i had a strong team
that could build the first few robots and prove that the robots would work and then you go through how do you commercialize this into a finished product and how then now how do you start marketing deploying it and these are all the biggest learnings for me is these are three different businesses at three different stages and and layer on top of all of that that all of the customer scott and the antibiotics team are working with there's no ability to fail like this is their system of record the
most important part of their entire company you can't mess it up so how do you go from the robot that's in the you know back shop that has been tinkered with that works to fully commercialized technology solution and i think that's the biggest challenge for all the founders that are on this call is that you guys picked a really difficult space but as a result you know it's worth it's worth diving into and it's worth getting um all the innovation there sparked for yuri for you specifically you kn
ow i i like to ask vcs especially ones that you know get on a fairly early stage with a company what role they they can and should actually play and sort of like helping but you know both develop this vision but things you know things like those first couple hires and and obviously the answer varies from from uh from vc to vc but you know on your ends with antibiotics specifically um how close a role did your team end up playing in that development scott my question was for you yuri i know um yo
u know look so when i invested it was scott and maybe 15 or 17 people and there was literally one little robot prototype that worked it was super early and really you know i wasn't misrepresenting myself my background or forerunners but we don't have a robotics background and scott didn't bring us on board as partners for that he wanted somebody who understood the mindset of his future customers who could open the doors make introductions help him understand what is he building towards because y
ou can build in a vacuum and have technology that works but where is it going to show up in the end and once it's there how can we make sure that people see antibiotics as not just a point solution but really a whole new way of delivering services and and wildly different than ever before um and so that's what we came in to do and you know in those early days you're picking your partner mainly because you need a cheerleader you need someone to pick up the phone and just unabashedly speak on your
behalf make sure that you know you can you can justify that this is our real team and they're you know working on some real good stuff um and ultimately just open up your network and your rolodex and i think those are all the things that i tried to do early days and you know you do have to ebb and flow because sometimes it wasn't helpful because he was in you know dev mode and needed to just work on the technology and so any new customer call wasn't going to be helpful because he knew he needed
to get the product to the next level and so it's a fluid relationship with your earliest investors you want somebody that ultimately believes in the vision and believes in you because we've had a lot of interesting ups and downs right scott over the last few years and the vision has been the same since the very beginning and i still a thousand percent believe in it and i a thousand percent believe in scott and his team so certainly the team has changed in the beginning you needed generalists yo
u needed people who could roll up their sleeves get done sorry um you know and now we have an incredible cast of executives who have deep expertise in robotics in you know sales and management in security in data like all the different things that we need but we didn't need that back then um in the very beginning to quickly follow up on that you know at the beginning of of the conversation i asked essentially you know what what attracted yuri what attracted you to antibiotics but you know let's
let's put that on its head and scott what were you looking for in a in a backer early on someone that understood the future of modern commerce you know there's so many kind of perspectives out there and and some of them are maybe a herd perspective there's not that many visionaries that exist in the venture capital world latest one you you know in some cases cut copy paste what was successful for for others but yuri and forerunner on had a deep deep understanding of what the future of modern com
merce was going to be they were there defining it through their investments so you know i might be an autumn you know an automation visionary but but yuri's you know a commerce visionary understanding the consumer understanding you know digitally native retail brands understanding what the market was going to evolve into in the macro aspect of what the consumer is going to be looking for and who's going to be selling that stuff so to pair up with another visionary that understood had a deep deep
understanding of what the future was going to look like it was there shaping that future that was key versus someone who i invested on just copy what these other guys did and do that thing and we'll be fine why aren't you copying it that was never a conversation yuri and i have ever had um so when you asked how did she contribute in the early days it you know certainly was cheerleader but it was also a great validation that i didn't have to go to 40 different places to understand product market
fit he intrinsically understood what the market needed maybe not that the technical solution to it that's where me and my team come in but when we talk about the platform and the service level and the solution set what what is needed to drive these these brands that she had deep knowledge and understanding of and the consumer so um she was also you know a big part of a therapist you know this isn't easy and having someone in your corner and on your side that wants to help and help isn't necessa
rily picking up their you know the right microprocessor for computer platform how help is just sometimes just looks like support and and uh something to bounce these ideas and concepts off of looking for validation and brian i think that's the most important thing is if your investor is telling you how to do the crux of your job there's a lot of problems with that statement right you do not want me picking anything in the robot now when i think about those early days thinking about hey scott her
e are your strengths as a leader here's who you want to augment your team here's how you might think about evolving that organization as it grows through these like very chunky inflection points that that's the part that is very much therapist it's knowing you as a leader you know scott like where where will you feel the most supported and ultimately in those early days like you were cto ceo see i mean you were like 12 different jobs and that was actually the biggest concern from our perspective
was you're gonna burn out so how do we peel this stuff back and it's taken years to be able to accomplish that because it's hard to you know portion that off from a founder's brain um but very much the earliest backers have to believe in you because if they don't then you're spending all your time convincing your backer and how does that help julio if you can actually start uh rolling the slide deck right now um scotty it's it's a very interesting story what actually uh behind the company and a
nd and why it was so compelling and why it was something that you needed to convince yourself not to do i mean where where were you and where did you sort of stumble upon i guess the you know abstractly the big idea behind antibiotics well stumble is a great way to describe it my background's in manufacturing automation and so i've helped companies in canada integrate digital manufacturing strategies um so before that i was a cabinet maker so i come from a very practical background i'm not an en
gineer that's that's the first most important part i'm not an engineer so i'd actually reached out to kiva systems that amazon bought now is amazon robotics to use them as part of a manufacturing buffer at the end of a manufacturing line and i'd like to find the receptionist there because i owe her at least a dinner or a bottle of wine she said thank you but we're no longer accepting inquiries and hung up on me and i was like who the hell doesn't want my money and then quick google search i'm li
ke oh the company that amazon just bought for over three quarters of a billion they don't want my money i'm like okay it makes sense but i'm like why i never worked in supply chain really and i was like why did they just spend this what's going on and they started diving deep into automated fulfillment for modern commerce and i saw that everything out there was a derivative of a human-centric you know system we're two-dimensional we walk on the ground we drive on the ground so we need rows and i
sles to access goods and if you think about most automation systems they rose and house so i literally said well nature's probably got this figured out naively or bravely and then i started watching nature documentaries on youtube and i found a documentary about leaf cutter amps and that was the aha moment because leafcutter ants build storage rooms around vertical access of their storage goods not horizontal axis of people so then i was like well what would that look like so i did up a quick ca
d model showing what storage like bins or totes or whatever you want to call would be like in vertical axis and and then i did some math and realized it was 12 of the space of the cuba system and had distinct advantages so most technology companies built some tech and then go try to find a problem for it to solve that's not the way we started started with a problem and realized that geometry actually better the problem because there is there's your two-dimensional distribution of goods in a in a
n each item fulfillment warehouse that's actually a picture of an amazon rex if you put it up high and need a ladder to get it you've lost all efficiency so it's just acres and acres of stuff and then so if we're going to use vertical axis of goods to take advantage of ceiling height how do we create as much densification like an ant colony very very dense and then how would stuff move around this so the next was workflow that we figured out the last thing we figured out was the robot it started
with opportunity advantage right both workflow storage density real estate labor all of these considerations and then how do we get the robot to move the bins around in that geometry so you know problem solution opportunity that's why the slides that i chose because those are the ones that really break it down and the opportunity was well at the end of the day we're all in this to actually make money venture capitalists are not terrible organizations um so how can we show that there is a big en
ough market need and there's a big enough opportunity to actually take the time that's going to take and the investment it's going to take to realize this solution set for the market and so this slide i brought up was just the change in consumer behavior versus how far behind automation for modern commerce was lagging which shows that it was growing 30 year-over-year but the increase in spending automation was only five percent there was going to be a backlog that needs to be filled and we're fe
eling that now you know so the the idea came from rejection um for men from manufacturing and realized that that nature actually presented a solution to a very complex problem so um actually if we have the video this would be a good time to play it if you're able to julio on your end um your yuri as we're looking through here i mean obviously as you said the pitch deck wasn't what sold you but you know now that we're a little removed from this early series a pitch sticker what works and here the
story does that not sound like it needs to exist oh for sure yeah and and that's where it was it we understood the problem from a different standpoint which is fulfillment cost supply chain related costs is 18 to 20 of your p l as a retailer there's no more margin left prices are coming down they're ubiquitous you've got to compete against amazon where are you going to build profit nowhere and yet your customers want everything faster and demand that if they if they don't get it they're going t
o go somewhere else so when you have a customer who's so strapped in a corner needing to make change the bigger problem is we'll wait a minute though how do you turn one fulfillment center off and then just spin up another one there's too much transition time transition cost transition risk and the thing that got us that scott didn't mention necessarily in in that um overview is that this cube can be as big or as small as you want so if you wanted to try it with just a handful of your products y
ou could take a hundred bins a thousand bins five thousand bins i mean that system is probably three hundred thousand bins so that system's about eight thousand here oh that one's eight thousand yeah so our smallest solution is 350 bins that someone tried it and is using it for medical supply and micro fulfillment our biggest solution is 190 000 bits so you can put that in the back of your house you know back of your warehouse and just try it out and that was where we thought okay technology is
one thing but how can they use it if they want it if they are willing to pay for it but they don't know how to get it started it's still going to be a no on the sale so that's where both scott and forerunner were thinking about this from a very practical standpoint great technology doesn't do anything if you can't implement it with normal people in normal warehouse solutions and that's been the journey is to say okay well can we get this started show you that it works give you trust train your t
eams and then earn the right to build bigger solutions yeah i think he put it really well in an earlier conversation we had this idea of almost like having it off in the corner so you can go you can go through your regular warehouse business and then have that on the side um i did want to ask really you know quickly because this is so focused on this deck um you know as you're looking through that series a deck although it wasn't what convinced you like what yuri what works and what doesn't nece
ssarily work with the deck you know i think this one um you want me to break down these four slides yeah okay um go to the next one julio so one thing that founders navigate all the time is trying to figure out if they need to educate the person across from them the venture capitalists that they're pitching on the market or if the investor actually already knows about the problem that exists and i will tell you if the person doesn't understand the problem you are very unlikely to convince them i
n this 30 minute pitch so that's one place where you can say what do you know about this space like is this a problem that you also see that you've encountered in your other investments or in your other work because he didn't need to pitch me any of these slides actually i already know this but it was a context setting that says all right we're all on the same day talking about this picture right here this looks inefficient it doesn't take a genius it doesn't take a roboticist to say yes scott i
agree with you then you go to the next slide and now you're talking about how do how do we solve it and the solution felt wild and imaginative but it did make generally logical sense but for us it was very much okay the practicalities of how do you implement it that was the biggest aha and you know i don't know scott if you had a slide on that in the original slide deck but we talked about it because originally like we were like how would you possibly get this started like it's it's just not go
nna work if someone's gotta switch over the whole thing it's a you know 100 million dollar investment takes five years to get going and then by the time you've launched the technology's old that's the problem with this industry everything takes too long and so you know when he started talking about the the iterations that you could do that's when the conversation got you know much more engaged so this is very quick to what do we do and you don't want to take 27 slides to tell you what you're doi
ng you know get that out of the way and i thought that was well done back in the day um and then the next slide was really around the tan and every good venture capitalist wants to know all right well how much if we win how many dollars are at stake and it's just unfathomable if you can fix this and you can scale it out everybody would want to use this because it's everybody against amazon even amazon can't beat amazon anymore like they're outdating themselves and they need antibiotics for thems
elves too but that's another story right um but you know and and so there's one part of the story which is what do we need to do to get current goods to efficiently go where they need to go in the existing warehouses we have but then you and we talked about the scott during that first meeting what if those warehouses don't need to be in kansas anymore they can be in san francisco in new york city because they can be in the back of the house or in your dark store and that's where it's like oh wow
this is all really making sense and for for me as a layperson not a roboticist i could figure out a 300 bin system that doesn't seem terribly impossible 300 000 seems a little bit harder but like 300 i can get my head around and that's how that's how we grew the idea to ebb and flow where people's heads are at because then you talk to a massive multi you know hundreds of store retailer they don't want a 300 bin solution they want the million bin solution so poor scott's team is whiplashing betw
een can i get 100 bins can i get a thousand bins and then can i get a million bins and his answer was yes because it doesn't matter it's just more racks and more robots and more bins but i think what we came across is actually it's the software that's pretty complicated so that's what we've been working on and that's a net new part of the business that we've had to build out and that i didn't know was going to be the problem i don't think scott did it either in the beginning um so i think for al
l the founders on this call it's not just your robot like what else has to be in place and if your customer is the retailer they don't have all those resources so who are you partnering with who's integrating you who else is going to be there to make sure your system is working in the environment it was built to work in and those are the nuances of your idea might be great and it might work but it actually doesn't win because it can't get executed so modularity scalability flexibility sounds lik
e are kind of at least on the hardware side those are the the keys to the system those are things that are notoriously untrue in automation yes flexibility modularity no yuri really hit on something there is we early on developed the software to route the robots but what we found is there was no overall software management system that could actually capitalize on the potential of our technology in in delivering really disruptive change in supply chain so the legacy software systems we thought we
were replacing legacy hardware systems and we realized that there actually had to be a big build on replacing the software systems to actually get the most value out of the technology so there's being a big investment in our site in intelligence and software that in the early days we didn't even realize we would need but that adds to the overall value proposition and the one thing that has evolved like antibiotics hasn't really pivoted um in any kind of traditional sense we haven't moved away f
rom anything that we've ever built and kind of scrapped anything but what's evolved is that if we can do small systems and we design small systems so we can get our foot in the door but now we can place those small systems in a fraction of the square footage closer to the consumer we can start automating the back room and not just the warehouse and then the intelligence needed to operate a bunch of small systems holistically networked small systems um is has been the evolution of the product and
the solution now so we can go in and deliver you know network micro fulfillment supply chain uh transitions to companies where they're still trying to figure out how the hell they would even do that and we have but that's been about not about wanting to grow our ip portfolio or just tackle more it's been here's what we thought the problem is but the problem actually turned into this which is actually this and my team has been able to provide solutions to all of those problems and so the questio
n not becomes you know should we it's like why not us we believe that we're at the forefront of this thinking for what modern consumers need but the tools are beyond as we mentioned earlier beyond robots robots are only as good as the intelligence that drives them so before we move on to the pitches we've got a good question from one of the viewers right now the question is how did forerunner discover antibiotics or maybe the question should be who discovered whom that's actually a good question
we were mutually discovered through a retail partner that we both were closely with who at the time was doing a international rfp to think about the supply chain of the future and they had turned over every stone every nook and cranny in this whole wide world to figure out who are the players what is what would it look like if you started it from scratch and it was unbound and they found scott at some random conference and tracked him down and asked what are you doing he's like got his robot un
der his arm you know it was that early and they they were brave enough to say we wanna we wanna build it together we wanna we wanna be a part of this story we want you to we want you to build this and with that um there was a commercial relationship that happened but then also an investment relationship and then they called us and said we came across this amazing company would you be interested and at first it was robotics and not really but you know then the then the solution to the problem tha
t was obvious and then it was a yeah hell yeah so um it was very overkill we got lucky i think is the answer um more instinct we put yes we all got lucky who got lucky everybody got lucky antibiotics definitely got lucky um we come from a bizarre market i'm in calgary alberta canada this is not a hotbed for supply chain automation i'm not in boston i'm not in silicon valley and exposure to early stage investors especially visionary early stage investors is challenging for some companies um and m
ost early stage investors you know i was told not by yuri but others that they will not invest in a company that takes them more than 45 minutes to drive to to go yell at so we were kind of out of the geographic zone for early stage because it is very hands-on experience pre-hybrid work exactly um so but having that common kind of connection through the customer and having the customer willing to invest in the business and willing to you know buy the technology um was was very fortunate for us a
nd you you can't you know you can't take luck out of any equation and i can't stress this enough to any any entrepreneur anyone starting up luck is a big factor do everything you can to improve your luck and your chances um and then when you're presented with an opportunity make sure you're positioned to capitalize on it you got to be ready for when luck shows up the harder you work the luckier you become that doesn't guarantee you will be lucky and we were lucky and we continue to be lucky um a
nd you know timing is everything yeah and uh just be ready for it when it shows up and if you work hard it will great are you ready to see some pitches hell yeah all right let's do this uh let's bring on our first picture got morgan chan of astro technologies uh so just to run everybody through this real quickly it's going to be a two minute long pitch we're going to hear from three companies and then after each one is done pitching then uh the two of you will get a four minute four minutes for
for q a or ands or advice for these uh these pitchers and um keep in mind these are all uh we we found these companies today so this is this is really fresh which should make it i think all the more exciting cool do we have are you there morgan did i mention this is still really fresh i cannot stress that enough got it i can't hear you morgan but i can't see good okay we're gonna bring up uh govind govind from uh ten infinite drones is the name of the company govinda are you there there we go al
l right hello hey hi hey hi hey hey thanks for joining me so you know you know you know the rough rough deal you're gonna get a really quick countdown you'll get two minutes to tell us what you're doing perfect all right you're gonna see a countdown pop up there three two one go hey guys uh thanks for this opportunity my name is gohan i'm calling from bangalore india it's almost midnight here but it's okay this is a great opportunity so we are 10 infinite drones we built one of the smartest inte
lligent drone tech for companies for sectors like agriculture and different other domains we also build ugvs or rovers for custom solutions uh the problem we are trying to solve is in india we don't have any customized solution drones for various sectors and uh if we take agriculture it's got a lot of different unorganized sectors and it's got a lot of an organized environment so we got to build drones that are relevant to certain areas and certain customized crops that is exactly what we do as
a solution and we have almost raised close to half a million dollars plus as an investment now uh we are making uh we will we are on track to make around 150 000 uh this year uh we're just under a year as a company um we definitely are looking for future investments and we'll definitely put you back thank you so much great all right very succinct um yuri you want to kiss off so as is my usual mo who are you selling to and what is the problem that they're trying to solve with the drones so basica
lly we our end users are contract farmers or the farmers uh in india as you know 60 of our land is agriculture which is quite unorganized um and these contract farmers are part of large multi-corporation companies so we get into a contract with companies like itc tata and different other global companies and then we work with these companies to propose our product solutions and device spraying solutions data and yield assessment that is required for the supply and the uh the cost saving the oper
ational costs that we reduce through our operations so if i were to understand this correctly you're not really making drones you're making the intelligence for specific market sectors you're doing you know mapping pre-planning to better utilize fertilizer or herbicide planning like that and so the roi on this is actually what they save in chemicals application process because of the intelligence that is provided in advance of that that process is that is that right that's true yep excellent and
so what differentiates your technology because i'm assuming you can put that on any drone performance that's a fair question why why why you why you i'll give you one example right for example uh weber solutions that basically saves a couple of gallons of water for several acres that we cover which is not possible for other companies that are probably willing to do the same applications in india it's quite unorganized because we all depend on other developed countries for procurement and purcha
se but what we try and understand is there are simple applications um that we have patented that basically helps in smart spraying applications which will save both chemical and water while spraying they're not all over the place because specifically on crops and it's different for different crops in india coffee is different when you compare coffee to brazil so then we build rovers with a combination of drones so that is where we get more customized and and specific to the problem and then we b
uild it in mass i think what scott was also trying to get at is the financial math that happens for your customers so what are they saving in what time frame what cost of the drone so basically our cost of recovery uh we actually get into services uh when we manufacture drones so we charge cost per acre uh basically our break even is if we cover like hundreds of acres or let's call it 100 hectares or 500 hectares we have covered our cost which is the cost of our manufacturing because it's in ind
ia we keep the cost quite low when we build our things ourselves and we put out our pilots so basically our cost of operations are covered in several acres we do as we go in volumes our profit our profit and revenue goes up as a company is is farming different in india than the rest of the world absolutely it's it's quite very very different um technology then is indian agriculture there's no other no there is there are properties uh which is uh solutions for the global world why we are focused
on indian market is it's a very unorganized space that requires a lot of innovation and if we can do this in india we can do it anywhere in the world because farming and agriculture is quite organized in u.s and other markets so that's what we believe when there is not when there is no organized sector there's an opportunity uh that we can address right we are unfortunately out of time but government for joining us thank you for watching you guys so thank you so much for the opportunity i'll wri
te you guys thank you i saw i saw everybody's eyes light up with that last bit about if we can basically if the the frank sinatra thing if we can do it here we can do it anywhere thanks for joining us uh we are we're gonna try morgan again morgan buddy can we swap gobinds out for morgan all right let's give this another shot hopefully morgan is not selling us some sort of video conferencing technique i will not be buying it from him morgan are you there tech founders got to learn how to use zoom
guys i'm gonna i'm gonna start my own countdown and webex there we go all right morgan thank you for joining us um we are as i said before we're gonna give you uh two minutes of pitch four minutes for q a you're going to see countdown clock should be popping up there three two one go ah nope let's let's get let's get your sound on morgan you're just you're muted on your end you're you're muted and zoomed there clock is running okay all right all right so we've got that yeah we are uh making sur
e this we developed mobile robots uh for cargo loading to solve more than the most labor-intensive and time-consuming part of warehouse processes uh the idea came about when everyone's working from home and so is my wife since my wife is in logistic industry uh i was always overheard how she how her customer are enabled to build containers and always lack of workers deal with the constrained supply chain issue so i dug further into the possibility of robot handling uh the docket loading uh to my
surprise there's a few companies that are in development but none of them deployed so late last year i began you know to dig further into uh developing mobile robots uh so uh through the past 15 years i was working overseas through you know mostly developing electronics and i was able to uh partner with a few companies that we are currently in development of the mobile robots and currently the beta stage and some luck is my wife were able to introduce a few pilot customers which will begin pilo
t program in a few months but the main point doesn't validate the market needs for the robot so a few weeks ago i began some quickly out and lord and behold you know we signed up around two customers per week for pilot programs uh we've realized and found basic traction and we are solving a pain point which businesses are going to pay up to five thousand dollar money to alleviate part of the warehouse operations uh we will begin sending out two robots for park pilot in next few months and as of
day we have over half a million arr booking just from the pilot program customers alone uh hopefully we begin a production starting first quarter next year and begin our second phase for astro all right i'm gonna let scott take this one first because i can't imagine a pitch that's more i mean outside of like you know long long boards it's right in your wheelhouse i want to understand you are doing the case like unpacking of shipping containers is that yes is that right yes i mean you're doing it
with with amrs oh i guess amar exactly yeah i'd have exactly so you want to do the delivery after it leaves the container uh yeah basically like into the warehouse or someplace yeah yeah for unloading boxes from card containers so i understand why you want to address this from a labor constant point of view you know getting the containers unloaded getting them into the supply chain is key and labor is a huge challenge if they're manually unloaded um how does your solution compare to some of the
larger integrated docs solutions that are doing automated case unloading now because you're talking about a modular amr-based versus kind of you know bigger robotic solution how is yours different um first of all r is mobile uh you know as and second of all is extremely intuitive is basically uh we have a touch pad at the back of the robot which uh you know direct the robot in franklin king and press go and that's basically it and our price is i guess is the most attractive perspective is uh th
rough a pilot program we are charging customers 5000 a month to unload as many you know containers as they could you know as a robot able to handle uh so from a customers cost constraint perspective is extremely attractive to a lot of our uh poly customers yuri when you think about that customer base um who it's great that your wife has access to some pilot customers i think those are the advantages you have to exploit as an early stage founder so that's great and i love the scrappiness of just
pulling up craigslist and posting it to see you know what the response is because that that's it you've got to be scrappy and hack around and just that the fact that you've got some um ar getting going just with the pilot is uh is awesome so i mean i think what scott's also trying to get at is you know who who's the sweet spot customer because there's uh it it sounds like the price point's interesting but usually what ends up happening if price is too interesting is it's not good for you your ma
rgins are not good enough so prices are going to have to go up as you scale so how do you think about like if you're the solution for this particular part of the market what what would that part be like who's the people we all since you know tons of competitors especially like you know boston dynamics still a top-down approach our uh our thinking is more bottom approach so we we target virtually any importers or uh third-party just a company that handles you know around 20 container plus a month
uh they could definitely utilize a system you know with you know money to spare so that is basically approach and uh most of our public customers there are mostly third party logistics we've got a few uh importers of utensils and uh you know wholesalers and so forth so you know our street sport is mostly right now at least uh what we've seen in our pilot customers and mostly third-party logistics and small moving signs importers how does your productivity compare to to manual labor great questi
on yeah yeah that is a great question uh well currently is we are picking around 600 pieces per hour uh that is definitely not up to par in just a human but uh you know uh us of the you know as of the uh ai basically improved we definitely pick a lot faster since i'm able to pick around approximately you know uh i would say able to do around i would say around close to a thousand boxes per hour but the ai itself right now is definitely uh not at the level yet but we eventually will reach there b
ox every four seconds impressive sir if you're if you're able to do that keep going hope so all right well thank you so much for joining us that was great all right so let's bring um hubert chan like no relation as far as i know another chat coming up next um while we wait for hubert um you know one of the things that that struck me is interesting is is he morgan really tied it to this this personal story you know and as we were having the conversation with scott earlier you know obviously scott
's got this really interesting founding story is that is that something that's kind of that attracts you to a startup i think so and really it's not the story necessarily but just the the question of why are you starting this company because if you're just sort of thinking about an idea and decided you're gonna pick a robotics company that's not gonna lead to a very successful outcome because you don't know anything about the industry but if you had a personal story and you have a connection to
it and it taps like the resources that you have i think that leads more towards why you're the right founder to solve this problem yuri once told me that she wasn't investing in an idea she was investing in my ability to realize that idea so i think people matter at the early stage they're all you have yeah until they're replaced by robots right founder robots who's making that company yeah hubert uh we have you yep are you can you mute oh let me there we go all right no you muted one more time
you mute yourself again there all right say hi hey i don't think we can hear you i'm not getting anything yeah one more time all right there we go if you could turn it up a little bit on your and if that's possible one two three you got it okay all right cool so and then and and maybe just project a little bit because you're still a little bit low so um here's the deal you're gonna get two minutes to pitch and then uh you well three two one go hi my name is huber chan i'm the founder of helpful
online touring and helpful sas i started this business because i used to struggle with homework assignments in the middle of the night but right now we are specialized in subjects such as debate and computer science we have over six figures of profit and 95 retention rate um right now we are considering a pivot um last year during a strict lockdown several businesses reached out and asked us if we can build them a platform that is similar to helpful sas platform they have to use so many differen
t software to keep their business uh productive remotely they have to use the assume for video conferencing paypal for billing calendly for scheduling list goes on it's pretty difficult to run a business online remotely as you can imagine but this is actually a huge market there are more than 87 million small to medium-sized businesses in hong kong and america and at my sas platform they will be able to create a robust web application with all of the tools they need in one place under one roof f
or example we have a scheduling feature to facilitate third party communication and a video conferencing feature with a timer and a payment integrated with it and a in a learning management system and also a multi-language user interface for international businesses at helpful we believe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and we are uniquely qualified to run this business because we have been running a up and coming online touring platform for several years with our six six figures n
et profit at helpful we wanted to let everyone know that an expert is just a few clicks away all right so i was going to let yuri go first but i saw scott crack a smile there about halfway through i saw you i saw i saw you thinking of something and preparing that question so i'm going to actually let you start i agree with you hubert and i say this was a very well rehearsed pitch you can see you've done it a number of times um and that's refreshing why is yours different than the other big compa
nies that are trying to solve the same problems why you why not zoom why not teams because they're all working on similar aspects what makes your solution special and how will you take on those more entrenched bigger organizations yes great question first we have a unique timer connected to the payment system for example an attorney or a teacher can have a lesson for one minute and uh one one hour and 15 minutes then the credit card system will be able to charge this uh the client exactly the ri
ght amount that is going to save so much administrative cost with zoom and teams they don't really have a payment integrated with the the with the credit card and we also have a learning management system that will automatically store clients text messages and files with zoom you often have to save every messages at the end of the conference call but everything will be deleted at the end so that's not the best user experience if i can actually piggyback on that real quick what is defensible abou
t your technology you know what's the stop zoom from coming in if your product is successful and repeating it um yeah so we will create an online digital presence for international businesses assume it's more like a communicative communication tool but there are so many businesses who need an online presence for a multi-language audience so a combination of these features will be able to uh give us a head start you know i think brian's question was you got any ip that protects you from having th
em just doing what you're doing um well um i i think you know um as entrepreneur we have to be diligent and you know if our team with more uh resources come after us we will just need to um work harder and punch above our weight get a patent attorney my friend okay i think the answer was no there was no ips scott yes get a patent attorney you know hubert i would um i would offer some advice versus a question here because i think when you started the pitch you spent you know 15 or 20 seconds talk
ing about the tutoring platform and it really kind of got me thinking about a really different topic matter so when then when you said you were pivoting i said okay you just told me a bunch of great stats about this tutoring company but obviously it's not working because you're pivoting now i gotta like reframe and think about this whole other business i understand that this company came out of your existing work and knowledge and customer need from the tutoring company but i might just start fr
om the the company that you're selling now and at the end of the pitch say you know why us well we've been doing this we've been hacking around for three years doing this tutoring company and like it really evolved out of a customer need and so now we're we're addressing a broader landscape and a broader need set versus just the actual content of the tutoring thank you it's when you think about it anyone that's offering like their individual professional services um certainly has a need for what
you're talking about to simplify the workflow and work streams most of the ones that come to mind are subscription models right now where you have access to professionals for content um [Music] but when it comes to when you talk about lawyers and stuff like that i'm the first thing that came to mind was only fans made huge revenues but make sure you understand the demographic you're going off there the problem you're solving um and how you're going to approach the market um and understand too t
hat the best thing you can do is create a moat around yourself with some ips so they have to come and don't pivot away from the one thing that's making you money it's the lessons of only fans yeah absolutely uh hubert thank you so much for joining us good luck thanks good luck thank you all right and that uh that about wraps us up for the week um another reminder real quick so we've got a twitter space coming up i will be back on in an hour we will continue the conversation about robotics and tc
robotics is coming up uh a week from tomorrow uh so scott and yuri this was fantastic thank you so much for joining us thanks thanks scott thank you see you later everybody you
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Grand opening of Justice
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