The Robotics Stack
00:41:57 · Xara
[00:41:57] S2: That's great. I think a lot of people, especially a lot of tech entrepreneurs, whether it's in France or United States, a lot of their first business had to be something that's very unique. Right? I will give you example in China. In China, there's a there's a company called Tencent. Tencent is one of the biggest social network in China. Yeah. And the the CEO of Tencent is called Ma Huateng. Right? And initially, when he first first started Tencent, he built a social network, a product called QQ. He has to pretend to be a girl himself in order to attract new customers coming coming to your platform. So I think a a lot of tech companies, when they first started, they might start with something that tends to human nature. Right? Which is the desire for sex and companionship. And later on, it's more possible for us to evolve into more things because I I I wanna say there's a big ambition here. Eventually, we're not a sex toy company. We're not just like a sex robot company. Eventually, our robot is gonna walk off the bed. Eventually, it's gonna go to your garage. It's gonna go to... Into your kitchen. It's gonna wash your dish and clean your car, but there's no rush. Because there isn't really a model or platform for generalized robots yet. But starting with intimacy, let me ship thousands, millions of units inside Household first. Then later on with a software upgrade and OTA, maybe there's more functionality that comes out of it. But there's no rush because it's not there yet. The robotic brain, the chat to you moment has not arrived yet. For now, we only wanna make sure we we make it into a full business cycle before we expand the robot's intelligence capability.
00:43:18 · Leo, Xara
[00:43:18] S1: Yeah. And when you look at the robot... Humanoid robotics, I would say, industry as a whole right now, the main bottleneck, the main metric everybody looks at especially in China, I visited a bunch of more conventional humanoid robotics companies, if you could label them that way recently and the main metric they put forward in their speech and vision right now is the number of deployments and you might just very soon become the humanoid robotic company with the most deployments. [00:43:47] S2: Yes. Because [00:43:48] S1: if you have a large adoption, might just become, yeah, the first way in deployments for sure.
00:43:53 · Xara
[00:43:53] S2: Yeah. I I I think, Leo, it's great that you come down to China and visit a robotic company. And what you observe is that there's so many robotics company right now in China, especially humanoids, but, basically, none of them makes money other than Unitree. Unitree is the only profitable humanoid company right now on the planet. Even Tesla Optimus, right, or Figure does not make money. But Unitree, I think they did $1,000,000,000 in profit last year in in RMB because there's no real business application yet for humanoids. Right? So if we are able to prove that we're the first real business usage, the first product that's ready for mass market and for consumer, I think it's a big thing in robotic history. Right? There really isn't an intimacy robot that was actually widely adopted all across the world, and we aim to be the one of the first to do it. But I think it's good for robotic space because if we're able to prove that this is a sustainable business model, we have to remember intimacy is a feature. Right? The product is still humanoids, but intimacy is only part of it. In the future, once we have so many intimacy robots in all kind of household, we will continue to expand our capability. And one of the biggest barrier for a lot of robotics company right now, one of the worst thing is that they're not inside your house. Right? If robots are so good... If humanoids are so good, where are them? They're just doing dancing on on televisions. They're just doing dancing on TikTok. They're not inside our house. So if we are able to be the first humanoid company that actually goes inside people's house, then we collect so much data about household situation. Later on with that data, we can train better and better robotic model that can become more generalized and become more robust in all kind of household and situations. Our angle, our ambition definitely is we we do believe in AI. We do believe in a a more generalized platform. But I think as a company, we have to slowly move into that directions. Right? We shouldn't rush into it because we believe that a company in order to be healthy, it needs to be have a sustainable business first. It cannot just relies on just burning our investor or VC money. And and I think earlier, Oskar was asking us about our investment situations. We're very lucky to be backed by 18 different investors.
00:45:48 · Xara, Oskar
Even though we're only found in less than a year, we have have already raised three rounds. Very soon, we're closing our fourth round. We're very thankful for our investors who really believe in the visions, and we're super excited to bring this to market. And I I think Oskar, earlier was checking out our website. Very soon, we're gonna go on preorder and presale this November, on November 3. [00:46:07] S0: Wow. K. Yeah. I was about to ask, what is the road map? But this is an already direct to customer. Right? [00:46:13] S2: Direct to customers, we're not shipping until the the later part twenty twenty seven. [00:46:17] S0: Okay. Okay.
00:46:17 · Oskar, Xara, Leo
[00:46:17] S0: Okay. Okay. [00:46:17] S2: But there's a there's not no... Is that... We don't ship globally. We only ship to California in United States. We only ship to Japan. Right? Especially Tokyo. We only ship to Germany. Right? Germany is one of the most important part, and we only ship to Netherlands in Europe. So far, we don't surface any other countries in Europe because, you know, Germany and Netherlands, I think the Germanic parts are more open to this kind of thing. Right? Berlin has crazy scenes. And Netherlands, as you know, there's red red light district in Netherlands, and we wanna have Robo Bravo also in Netherlands too. So we we ship initially to countries or cities or provinces where we can service the user. Because as I said, if the robots gets break down, it needs to fix on time. Right? In the initial stage, we only serve a few European countries, Japan and US. We don't sell in China. We don't sell in anywhere in Asia yet other than Japan. We're we're actually a Cayman Island American company, and none of our business is in in China. We we just utilizing the entire Chinese supply chain because they're very, robotic supply chain, but our our best business, obviously, is global. The first stage of our company, we're expand in places where sex is more liberal. You know, they're more welcome to this kind of culture and things. Please go ahead. [00:47:25] S1: I see. Yeah. About your investors, are you actually able to say is there a Chinese, foreign, or a mix of both? [00:47:31] S2: They're actually all foreign investors. We don't have any Chinese investors.
00:47:31 · Xara, Leo
[00:47:31] S2: They're actually all foreign investors. We don't have any Chinese investors. [00:47:33] S1: Okay. Okay. Interesting. [00:47:35] S2: First of all, we cannot take any kind of Chinese money because we're not doing any business in China. So our company all bought back by US ones, and our main market is through The United States. Right? Me, personally, I was US educated. I was very lucky because I'm 32, and for the last thirty two years of my life, I actually spent half of it in in China and Hong Kong, the other half in United States and Canada. So I was very lucky to understand both the Western and the the Chinese culture really well. So utilizing the Chinese supply chain, which is very good for robotics, and understanding the Western market and the Western audience, I think we can utilize the best of both worlds. Right? Because I can keep it very cheap in China, and we can sell it globally. [00:48:10] S1: I see. Most of your staff is in Shenzhen from what I understand, but you are more for an American company in the end than a Chinese company. Is it correct to say that?