robotics
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Blue Prism acquires UK’s Thoughtonomy for up to $100M to expand its RPA platform with more AI
Robotic process automation — which lets organizations shift repetitive back-office tasks to machines to complete — has been a hot area of growth in the world of enterprise IT, and now one of the companies that’s making waves in the area has acquired a smaller startup to continue extending its capabilities.
Blue Prism, which helped coin the term RPA when it was founded back in 2001, has announced that it is buying Thoughtonomy, which has built a cloud-based AI engine that delivers RPA-based solutions on a SaaS framework. Blue Prism is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange — where its market cap is around £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion), and in a statement to the market alongside its half-year earnings, it said it would be paying up to £80 million ($100 million) for the firm.
The deal is coming in a combination of cash and stock: £12.5 million payable on completion of the deal, £23 million in shares payable on completion of the deal, up to £20 million payable a year after the deal closes, up to £4.5 million in cash after 18 months, and a final £20 million on the second anniversary of the deal closing, in shares. Thoughtonomy had never raised outside funding, although that was not for lack of interest.
“We’ve had approaches on a daily basis since the intelligent automation market has exploded,” said Terry Walby, CEO and founder of Thoughtonomy, in an interview, “but getting the best outcome for the company and our customers is not just about taking money and headlines [touting] our valuation.”
The acquisition comes about six months after Blue Prism announced it would be raising around $130 million (£100 million) to continue growing at a time when RPA is getting a lot of attention in the market. Linda Dotts, the company’s SVP of global partner strategy and programs, today confirmed that it did raise that money, and that part of the proceeds of that are being used to make the Thoughtonomy acquisition. She also confirmed that it would be looking at other opportunities, a sign that we are likely going to see at least a little more consolidation in this space.
On the same day that it had announced that fundraise, Blue Prism also unveiled a new AI initiative, working with partners to execute on that. And indeed that is what it is getting with Thoughtonomy. The companies were already working together before this — Thoughtonomy’s other key partners are companies like Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, used to deliver its services — and according to Walby, the idea is that his startup will be helping Blue Prism get its services to the next level of where RPA is going.
“We provide architectural support and add intelligence,” he said in an interview. “Our platform addresses activities that require understanding or interpretation, and so it expands the use cases for RPA beyond structured processes.”
That’s notable, given the position of Blue Prism within the RPA landscape. The company is one of the more legacy providers — one of the consequences of being an early mover — and while that gives it a clear advantage of showing it has staying power, in the world of software that can be a more challenging sell when younger companies are building tech from scratch on newer frameworks. (UiPath, which has made major inroads into RPA both in terms of its customer and partner growth, as well as in terms of its funding, is one example.)
And in a market that is still seeing growth (read: companies often operate at a loss to invest in that growth), its ups and downs are there for everyone to see and scrutinise. In its half-year earnings that it posted today, its negative EBITDA margin widened once more — sales, marketing and other business development efforts come at a cost, for one — although group revenues also nearly doubled to £41.6 million from £22.9 million in the same period a year earlier. Total customer numbers are up 91% over the same period a year ago, and with sales returns typically taking about 12 months to come through on the balance sheet, the longer-term picture is worth watching, too.
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Last day to save $100 on tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility 2019
This is it. The final call for all the mobility and transportation startuppers who want to save a solid Benjamin on their ticket to the TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 conference in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. The early-bird ticket price disappears tonight, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Beat that deadline and buy a ticket — or pay full freight.
Get ready to experience a full day devoted to the revolution that’s taking place within the mobility and transportation industries. More than 1,000 people — the greatest minds, biggest names and influential thinkers, makers and investors — will attend a day packed with interviews, panel discussions, fireside chats, demos and workshops.
Along with TechCrunch editors, speakers will question assumptions and examine complex technological and regulatory issues. They’ll discuss capital investment concerns and look at the ethics and human factors in a future of autonomous cars, delivery robots and flying taxis.
Here’s a small sample of the programming that’s on tap. The event agenda can help you plan your day, although you may have to clone yourself to catch it all.
Building Business and Autonomy: Co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson will be on hand to talk about Zoox, an independent autonomous vehicle company. Its cars can navigate tricky San Francisco streets — including the notoriously iconic Lombard Street. We’ll hear how Zoox plans to navigate the challenging road to business success.
The Future of Freight: The trucking industry is in serious trouble, and startups and OEMs are scrambling to come up with a solution. Volvo’s Jenny Elfsberg and Stefan Seltz-Axmacher of Starsky Robotics will join us to debate whether autonomous trucks are the fix we need or if another near-term technology can pave the way to a more efficient and profitable industry.
Will Venture Capital Drive the Future of Mobility? Michael Granoff of Maniv Mobility, Ted Serbinski of Techstars and Bain Capital’s Sarah Smith will debate the uncertain future of mobility tech and whether VC dollars are enough to push the industry forward.
Today’s the last day you can save $100 on your pass to the TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 conference in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. Buy your ticket by 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight, June 14 or kiss that early bird — and $100 — goodbye.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Sense Photonics flashes onto the lidar scene with a new approach and $26M
Lidar is a critical part of many autonomous cars and robotic systems, but the technology is also evolving quickly. A new company called Sense Photonics just emerged from stealth mode today with a $26M A round, touting a whole new approach that allows for an ultra-wide field of view and (literally) flexible installation.
Still in prototype phase but clearly enough to attract eight figures of investment, Sense Photonics’ lidar doesn’t look dramatically different from others at first, but the changes are both under the hood and, in a way, on both sides of it.
Early popular lidar systems like those from Velodyne use a spinning module that emit and detect infrared laser pulses, finding the range of the surroundings by measuring the light’s time of flight. Subsequent ones have replaced the spinning unit with something less mechanical, like a DLP-type mirror or even metamaterials-based beam steering.
All these systems are “scanning” systems in that they sweep a beam, column, or spot of light across the scene in some structured fashion — faster than we can perceive, but still piece by piece. Few companies, however, have managed to implement what’s called “flash” lidar, which illuminates the whole scene with one giant, well, flash.
That’s what Sense has created, and it claims to have avoided the usual shortcomings of such systems — namely limited resolution and range. Not only that, but by separating the laser emitting part and the sensor that measures the pulses, Sense’s lidar could be simpler to install without redesigning the whole car around it.
I talked with CEO and co-founder Scott Burroughs, a veteran engineer of laser systems, about what makes Sense’s lidar a different animal from the competition.
“It starts with the laser emitter,” he said. “We have some secret sauce that lets us build a massive array of lasers — literally thousands and thousands, spread apart for better thermal performance and eye safety.”
These tiny laser elements are stuck on a flexible backing, meaning the array can be curved — providing a vastly improved field of view. Lidar units (except for the 360-degree ones) tend to be around 120 degrees horizontally, since that’s what you can reliably get from a sensor and emitter on a flat plane, and perhaps 50 or 60 degrees vertically.
“We can go as high as 90 degrees for vert which i think is unprecedented, and as high as 180 degrees for horizontal,” said Burroughs proudly. “And that’s something auto makers we’ve talked to have been very excited about.”
Here it is worth mentioning that lidar systems have also begun to bifurcate into long-range, forward-facing lidar (like those from Luminar and Lumotive) for detecting things like obstacles or people 200 meters down the road, and more short-range, wider-field lidar for more immediate situational awareness — a dog behind the vehicle as it backs up, or a car pulling out of a parking spot just a few meters away. Sense’s devices are very much geared toward the second use case.
These are just prototype units, but they work and you can see they’re more than just renders.
Particularly because of the second interesting innovation they’ve included: the sensor, normally part and parcel with the lidar unit, can exist totally separately from the emitter, and is little more than a specialized camera. That means that while the emitter can be integrated into a curved surface like the headlight assembly, while the tiny detectors can be stuck in places where there are already traditional cameras: side mirrors, bumpers, and so on.
The camera-like architecture is more than convenient for placement; it also fundamentally affects the way the system reconstructs the image of its surroundings. Because the sensor they use is so close to an ordinary RGB camera’s, images from the former can be matched to the latter very easily.
The depth data and traditional camera image correspond pixel-to-pixel right out of the system.
Most lidars output a 3D point cloud, the result of the beam finding millions of points with different ranges. This is a very different form of “image” than a traditional camera, and it can take some work to convert or compare the depths and shapes of a point cloud to a 2D RGB image. Sense’s unit not only outputs a 2D depth map natively, but that data can be synced with a twin camera so the visible light image matches pixel for pixel to the depth map. It saves on computing time and therefore on delay — always a good thing for autonomous platforms.
Sense Photonics’ unit also can output a point cloud, as you see here.
The benefits of Sense’s system are manifest, but of course right now the company is still working on getting the first units to production. To that end it has of course raised the $26 million A round, “co-led by Acadia Woods and Congruent Ventures, with participation from a number of other investors, including Prelude Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Shell Ventures,” as the press release puts it.
Cash on hand is always good. But it has also partnered with Infineon and others, including an unnamed tier-1 automotive company, which is no doubt helping shape the first commercial Sense Photonics product. The details will have to wait until later this year when that offering solidifies, and production should start a few months after that — no hard timeline yet, but expect this all before the end of the year.
“We are very appreciative of this strong vote of investor confidence in our team and our technology,” Burroughs said in the press release. “The demand we’ve encountered – even while operating in stealth mode – has been extraordinary.”
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Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff
Financial troubles have forced Maker Media, the company behind crafting publication MAKE: magazine as well as the science and art festival Maker Faire, to lay off its entire staff of 22 and pause all operations. TechCrunch was tipped off to Maker Media’s unfortunate situation which was then confirmed by the company’s founder and CEO Dale Dougherty.
For 15 years, MAKE: guided adults and children through step-by-step do-it-yourself crafting and science projects, and it was central to the maker movement. Since 2006, Maker Faire’s 200 owned and licensed events per year in over 40 countries let attendees wander amidst giant, inspiring art and engineering installations.
“Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees” Dougherty tells TechCrunch. “I started this 15 years ago and it’s always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works…barely. Events are hard . . . there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship.” Microsoft and Autodesk failed to sponsor this year’s flagship Bay Area Maker Faire.
But Dougherty is still desperately trying to resuscitate the company in some capacity, if only to keep MAKE:’s online archive running and continue allowing third-party organizers to license the Maker Faire name to throw affiliated events. Rather than bankruptcy, Maker Media is working through an alternative Assignment for Benefit of Creditors process.
“We’re trying to keep the servers running” Dougherty tells me. “I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We’re not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I’m committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program.” The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.
The CEO says staffers understood the challenges facing the company following layoffs in 2016, and then at least 8 more employees being let go in March according to the SF Chronicle. They’ve been paid their owed wages and PTO, but did not receive any severance or two-week notice.
“It started as a venture-backed company but we realized it wasn’t a venture-backed opportunity” Dougherty admits, as his company had raised $10 million from Obvious Ventures, Raine Ventures, and Floodgate. “The company wasn’t that interesting to its investors anymore. It was failing as a business but not as a mission. Should it be a non-profit or something like that? Some of our best successes for instance are in education.”
The situation is especially sad because the public was still enthusiastic about Maker Media’s products Dougherty said that despite rain, Maker Faire’s big Bay Area event last week met its ticket sales target. 1.45 million people attended its events in 2016. MAKE: magazine had 125,000 paid subscribers and the company had racked up over one million YouTube subscribers. But high production costs in expensive cities and a proliferation of free DIY project content online had strained Maker Media.
“It works for people but it doesn’t necessarily work as a business today, at least under my oversight” Dougherty concluded. For now the company is stuck in limbo.
Regardless of the outcome of revival efforts, Maker Media has helped inspire a generation of engineers and artists, brought families together around crafting, and given shape to a culture of tinkerers. The memory of its events and weekends spent building will live on as inspiration for tomorrow’s inventors.
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Kiwi’s food delivery bots are rolling out to 12 more colleges
If you’re a student at UC Berkeley, the diminutive rolling robots from Kiwi are probably a familiar sight by now, trundling along with a burrito inside to deliver to a dorm or apartment building. Now students at a dozen more campuses will be able to join this great, lazy future of robotic delivery as Kiwi expands to them with a clever student-run model.
Speaking recently at TechCrunch’s Robotics + AI Session at the Berkeley campus, Kiwi’s Felipe Chavez and Sasha Iatsenia discussed the success of their burgeoning business and the way they planned to take it national.
In case you’re not aware of the Kiwi model, it’s basically this: When you place an order online with a participating restaurant, you have the option of delivery via Kiwi. If you so choose, one of the company’s fleet of knee-high robots with insulated, locking storage compartments will swing by the place, your order is put within, and it brings it to your front door (or as close as it can reasonably get). You can even watch the last bit live from the robot’s perspective as it rolls up to your place.
The robots are what Kiwi calls “semi-autonomous.” This means that although they can navigate most sidewalks and avoid pedestrians, each has a human monitoring it and setting waypoints for it to follow, on average every five seconds. Iatsenia told me that they’d tried going full autonomous and that it worked… most of the time. But most of the time isn’t good enough for a commercial service, so they’ve got humans in the loop. They’re working on improving autonomy, but for now this is how it is.
That the robots are being controlled in some fashion by a team of people in Colombia (from where the co-founders hail) does take a considerable amount of the futurism out of this endeavor, but on reflection it’s kind of a natural evolution of the existing delivery infrastructure. After all, someone has to drive the car that brings you your food, as well. And in reality, most AI is operated or informed directly or indirectly by actual people.
That those drivers are in South America operating multiple vehicles at a time is a technological advance over your average delivery vehicle — though it must be said that there is an unsavory air of offshoring labor to save money on wages. That said, few people shed tears over the wages earned by the Chinese assemblers who put together our smartphones and laptops, or the garbage pickers who separate your poorly sorted recycling. The global labor economy is a complicated one, and the company is making jobs in the place it was at least partly born.
Whatever the method, Kiwi has traction: it’s done more than 35,000 deliveries at an increasing rate since it started two years ago (now up to over 10,000 per month) and the model seems to have proven itself. Customers are happy, they get stuff delivered more than ever once they get the app and there are fewer and fewer incidents where a robot is kicked over or, you know, catches on fire. Notably, the founders said onstage, the community has really adopted the little vehicles, and should one overturn or be otherwise interfered with, it’s often set on its way soon after by a passerby.
Iatsenia and Chavez think the model is ready to push out to other campuses, where a similar effort will have to take place — but rather than do it themselves by raising millions and hiring staff all over the country, they’re trusting the robotics-loving student groups at other universities to help out.
For a small and low-cash startup like Kiwi, it would be risky to overextend by taking on a major round and using that to scale up. They started as robotics enthusiasts looking to bring something like this to their campus, so why can’t they help others do the same?
So the team looked at dozens of universities, narrowing them down by factors important to robotic delivery: layout, density, commercial corridors, demographics and so on. Ultimately they arrived at the following list:
- Northern Illinois University
- University of Oklahoma
- Purdue University
- Texas A&M
- Parsons
- Cornell
- East Tennessee State University
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Stanford
- Harvard
- NYU
- Rutgers
What they’re doing is reaching out to robotics clubs and student groups at those colleges to see who wants to take partial ownership of Kiwi administration out there. Maintenance and deployment would still be handled by Berkeley students, but the student clubs would go through a certification process and then do the local work, like a capsized bot and on-site issues with customers and restaurants.
“We are exploring several options to work with students down the road, including rev share,” Iatsenia told me. “It depends on the campus.”
So far they’ve sent 40 robots to the 12 campuses listed and will be rolling out operations as the programs move forward on their own time. If you’re not one of the unis listed, don’t worry — if this goes the way Kiwi plans, it sounds like you can expect further expansion soon.
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Robotics VCs on what’s real, what’s coming, and what to keep in mind
Last week, at TechCrunch’s robotics event at UC Berkeley, we sat down with four VCs who are making a range of bets on robotics companies, from drone technologies to robots whose immediate applications aren’t yet clear. Featuring Peter Barrett of Playground Global, Helen Liang of FoundersX Ventures, Eric Migicovsky of Y Combinator and Andy Wheeler of GV (pictured above), we covered a lot of terrain (no pun intended), including whether last-mile delivery robots make sense and how much robots should be expected to do without human intervention.
We also discussed climate change and how it factors into their bets, and why the many private enterprises focused on creating fully automated vehicles may need to do much more to empower the cities in which they plan to operate. You can find excerpts of our talk below. And for access to the full transcript, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
TC: How do you think about investing in the here and now, versus the future (which is complicated for VCs, given that venture funds need to produce returns within a ten-year window, typically):
PB: One of the challenges with investing in robotics is that robotics companies do tend to take a lot longer to mature than your average enterprise SaaS company. There are some classes of investments that we know the technology works; it’s just a question of commercializing it and bringing it to market, and Canvas [a Playground-backed company that makes autonomous warehouse carts and was just acquired by Amazon] did an extraordinary job of finding a market that existed and had technology in hand that would solve that problem.
There’s other stuff like the amazing work that the folks are doing at Agility [Robotics] with a biped that can operate for many hours in unstructured human environments that today is really, candidly, a research robot, and to reach its long-term aspirations, there’s a whole other set of technologies that we’ll need to develop as the company matures.
We think about blending the stuff that’s very impactful but is going to take a long time because it’s fundamentally a new science and technology that needs to be created, [with] immediate applications of technologies that are proven today, that we’re deploying against real markets.
AW: As for whether we try to build a portfolio where there are exits at different stages, generally, when I’m looking to invest in a robotics thing, I understand that the timeframes can be fairly long, and so what we’re looking for are things that really are going to be very large opportunities — that can generate billion-dollar-plus exits.
TC: A growing number of small last-mile delivery robots has attracted funding. Helen, your firm is an investor in one of these startups, Robby. What’s the appeal?
HL: We look at where we see a pain point in the market. During our team meetings on Fridays, we always use DoorDash. It feels awkward when we order a $100 meal, and the delivery person has driven a long way. We’ll give him a $15, but it’s still [tricky for that person] in terms of economics. If you have a central station for the food delivery, and robots can handle that last-mile delivery, we think that’s a more cost-effective approach.
Robby has partnered with PepsiCo [to delivering snacks to students attending the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Ca.] that makes it more like a vending machine, and we think that’s an interesting market, too. We’ll see how fast adoption will happen.
EM: YC is an investor in Robby as well, and we think of this as kind of the perfect example of how hackers can get into a fairly complex industry. When you look at some robotics and specifically autonomous vehicles, you see extremely large investments going into some of the some of the big players, but then at the same time, you see groups and hackers that are able to use off-the-shelf technology to solve real problems that affect businesses or people, and build services or products that that are valuable. We’ve seen this over and over.
You don’t have to be looking for a large VC investment to compete in the space. It is possible to stay frugal stay nimble and build something on a small scale to demonstrate that you found a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve. Then, if you’re interested, [you can] pursue larger VC investment or not. It’s kind of open right now.
TC: VCs we’ve talked with in the past have suggested that in robotics, they often see cool ideas for which there isn’t necessarily a market or big market need. Is this also your experience?
PB: This is a common pattern where there was some mechanism, some capability of the robot, some feat of dexterity or something [and founders think, ‘That’s really cool, I’m going to make a company out of it.’ But we think about it in terms of, what do you want from the robots? What’s the outcome that everybody agrees is worthwhile? And then, how do you find and build companies to achieve those goals?
One thing we’re struggling with right now is that there’s no real hardware or software platforms. You think about 10 years hence [and] the kinds of things we’ll be investing in, [and it’s] robotics applications that are aggregates of neural networks and some explicit software bound together in some form that can be delivered, so a large enterprise can use an application and not have everybody start from first principles. Because right now, when you built a robotics application, you make all the hardware, you make all the software. All the intellectual and actual capital [money] gets dissipated, building and rebuilding those same things. So robotics applications over time will be investable, much more like the way we invest in software, and that will allow smaller units of creativity to produce useful products.
TC: Andy, how long do you think it’s going to take until we get there?
AW: I think I think we’re making we’re making steady progress on that front. To your earlier question, this space has a lot of folks that are building technology a bit in search of a problem. That’s a common thing in startups generally. I would encourage everybody who’s looking to build a startup in the space is to really find a burning business problem. In the course of solving those [problems], people will build these platforms that Peter was talking about, and we’ll eventually get there in terms of [founders] just having to focus on the application layer.
TC: There are so many buckets: delivery robots, self-driving trucks. Both relate in ways to the overarching problem for our age, which is climate change. How much do you factor climate change into the investing decisions that you make?
PB: When we look at applications and robotics in agricultural, a lot of [our questions are] around how do you deal with a minimum carbon footprint, [and] how you replace workers who are missing. And dealing with climate change will be increasingly be a central thought in what we want from our robots. [After all] what we want from them is the ability to maintain or improve the lifestyles we have without further unwinding the environment.
TC: We talked backstage, and you think we are over-indexing on autonomy as the answer.
PB: When we think about autonomy, it’s not clear how autonomy helps cities. . . There are absolutely applications for autonomy, [including] on a farm or in a logistics environment. I think we still really don’t know how to do Level 5 [which is complete automation, requiring zero human assistance]. And I don’t think we know whether it’s exponentially hard or asymptotically. I think it’s decades before there’s any significant Level 5.
[In the meantime, if] we cared about safety, we’d install roundabouts or lower the blood alcohol limit and not try and make a sentient vehicle that drives on the road the way we do, right?
I’d much rather see having the city collaborate with the vehicles and instrument the city to collaborate with clever vehicles for the benefit of everybody who lives there. But that’s not Level 5 autonomy as the way we think of it
EM: It’s slightly interesting that autonomous vehicles, specifically the individual passenger car, evolved in America, because it’s one of the countries that has the least public transport per capita. And that that’s one of the things that the industry has to acknowledge — that there are other options that can be blended into the transport solutions for cities.
It seems like it might be happening because it’s something that an individual can take somewhat control over. You can’t own a bus, but you can own or [rent] a self-driving car.
PB: Or [an electric] scooter or a bike, right. The future of mobility is going to be a blending of all of these things. But not taking advantage of a logistics platform in a city means you’re kind of doing it the hard way, trying to make a robot to have all the human priors required to drive safely. And it’s just not clear that we know how to do that yet.
TC: Andy, GV is a big investor in Uber. What what’s your thinking? Does the city need to be a kind of central brain in order for these private enterprises to work effectively?
AW: I don’t think it’s a strict requirement at all. We’ve seen success with with self-driving trials where the city is not super involved from an infrastructure perspective, I do think it makes it a lot easier if that’s the case, though.
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Locus Robotics raises $26 million for warehouse automation
Warehouse automation is all the rage in robotics these days. No surprise then, that another emerging player just got a healthy slice of venture funding. Massachusetts-based Locus Robotics this week announced that it has secured a $26 million Series C. The round, led by Zebra Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, brings the startup’s total funding to around $66 million.
The five-year-old company produces robotic shelving designed to transfer bins inside of warehouses. Founder Bruce E. Welty was onstage at our robotics event back in 2017 demonstrating the technology.
It’s a similar principle to many other players in the space, including Amazon’s Kiva and Bay Area-based Fetch. And like those companies, Locus has garnered interest from some big players — most notably delivery giant, DHL.
The robotics automation space has heated up quite a bit in 2019. Colorado-based Canvas, which makes autonomous warehouse delivery carts, was acquired by Amazon last week. Even Boston Dynamics is looking at the category as a way forward for its own impressive technologies, putting its robot Handle to work in a fulfillment center.
“We have seen a massive uptick in demand for the flexible automation incorporated into Locus’s multi-bot solution, which is uniquely suited to address these challenges,” CEO Rick Faulk says in a release tied to the news. “Not only is our solution proven to dramatically improve productivity and drive down costs, but it is also a source of scalable labor that can be adapted to meet the demands of numerous product and customer profiles. This new funding will enable us to scale to meet growing demand for our revolutionary solution worldwide.”
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Digging into key takeaways from our 2019 Robotics + AI Sessions event
Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Brian Heater and Lucas Matney shared their key takeaways from our Robotics + AI Sessions event at UC Berkeley last week.
The event was filled with panels, demos and intimate discussions with key robotics and deep learning founders, executives and technologists. Brian and Lucas discuss which companies excited them most, as well as which verticals have the most exciting growth prospects in the robotics world.
“This is the second [robotics event] in a row that was done at Berkeley where people really know the events; they respect it, they trust it and we’re able to get really, I would say far and away the top names in robotics. It was honestly a room full of all-stars.
I think our Disrupt events are definitely skewed towards investors and entrepreneurs that may be fresh off getting some seed or Series A cash so they can drop some money on a big-ticket item. But here it’s cool because there are so many students. robotics founders and a lot of wide-eyed people wandering from the student union grabbing a pass and coming in. So it’s a cool different level of energy that I think we’re used to.
And I’ll say that this is the key way in which we’ve been able to recruit some of the really big people like why we keep getting Boston Dynamics back to the event, who generally are very secretive.”
Brian and Lucas dive deeper into how several of the major robotics companies and technologies have evolved over time, and also dig into the key patterns and best practices seen in successful robotics startups.
For access to the full transcription and the call audio, and for the opportunity to participate in future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
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Talk all things robotics and AI with TechCrunch writers
This Thursday, we’ll be hosting our third annual Robotics + AI TechCrunch Sessions event at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. The day is packed start-to-finish with intimate discussions on the state of robotics and deep learning with key founders, investors, researchers and technologists.
The event will dig into recent developments in robotics and AI, which startups and companies are driving the market’s growth and how the evolution of these technologies may ultimately play out. In preparation for our event, TechCrunch’s Brian Heater spent time over the last several months visiting some of the top robotics companies in the country. Brian will be on the ground at the event, alongside Lucas Matney, who will also be on the scene. Friday at 11:00 am PT, Brian and Lucas will be sharing with Extra Crunch members (on a conference call) what they saw and what excited them most.
Tune in to find out about what you might have missed and to ask Brian and Lucas anything else robotics, AI or hardware. And want to attend the event in Berkeley this week? It’s not too late to get tickets.
To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
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Uber, Lyft and the challenge of transportation startup profits
How much does transportation cost you?
In most cities, bus or subway fare might set you back $3 or so. A tank of gas, maybe $30 or $40 depending on your car. An hour of street parking? Sometimes it’s free, sometimes it’s a few bucks. And you can usually snag an economy seat on a round-trip U.S. domestic flight for less than $300.
These numbers probably ring true for most people. There’s just one problem: Everything you know about the cost of transportation is wrong.
Despite a massive infusion of venture capital into the transportation sector over the past few years, mobility startups are starting to learn what every transportation business has known for generations: transportation profits are elusive, and the system is mainly held together by subsidies. Will this be the first generation of transportation businesses to escape history?
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