The Robot Report Podcast
00:51:31 · Aaron Nathan
[00:51:31] S2: Yeah. I mean, there's, I'd say, two categories of things when you get to percussion. There's, you know, the relationship with your vendors. Like, if we're working with a robotic mower company, let's say, and what's the relationship between us and that mower company? We've designed the product around having these tools that let you make kind of observability decisions at scale because it's one thing to have a portal you log into and you can see one robot's health. But how do you do it when you have, like, a 100,000 robots operating and then you wanted to see, like, is there an issue in the whole of France? So these are these are considerations that, like, we've actually already built into our platform and then exposed APIs that allow our customers to now bring that into their dashboards. Because the thing that comes with scale is all those weird problems that happen, you know, once in a blue moon, they happen a lot because you have just a lot of things in the field. And so the customer service organization actually gets a ton of value by working with us because they can directly integrate into our system and see what we see. And that results in just having, you know, quicker ticket resolution, better understanding of, you know, the overall, you know, what's happening. And that's just one example. The other example is, like, when you are selling that many robots, you actually have to start thinking about how do I provision these things? Like, how do I build them in a factory? How are they tested? And so, again, it goes back to, like, being very thoughtful about the kind of, like, life cycle of this building of a robot and making sure that we have the correct APIs to support all that. And you know when a robot arrives at your customer, they're gonna turn it on, and it's gonna work. And that takes a lot of forethought. It takes vendors that are going to work with you very well. I mean, it's, I could tell you, like, just as a personal experience, we work with a lot of the cellular companies, and it is extremely difficult to put a SIM card in something and then know that it's going to work when you ship it to a customer and they turn it on.
00:53:45 · Aaron Nathan, Eugene Demetri
And a lot of these systems in robotics almost work the same way because it's like the physical world has a lot of variables, and so you just really have to make sure that you're arming the customer with as much information as you possibly can. The other part of scale I did wanna mention is just geographic scale. And so being able to show up to markets and have things work. And we've obviously built, you know, a ton of infrastructure. It's one of our core pillars of the business. But, you know, we still have places that don't have coverage. If you're doing an open pit mine in Northern Canada, we may not have coverage there yet. So we've actually figured out how do we work with customers to have deployable coverage where they can actually bring, you know, their own technicians to go and actually install equipment to make the Point One service work there? And it becomes managed. It's like a really amazing experience for them. And we've actually now had some customers come back and say, hey. Like, this is this is game changing for our business because we can completely take the infrastructure problem off the table for them too. [00:54:55] S3: Talking about building the business side of things, Point One Nav, for instance, to get our expertise across GNSS, networking, autonomy, robotics. Most companies are are good at maybe one of them. How did all this come together?
00:55:09 · Aaron Nathan
[00:55:09] S2: Yeah. I mean, I think... So generally speaking, I think this is true of most robotics companies is robotics requires you to be good at a lot of things, because it is a physical problem. So you have to have, like, mechanical engineers who know how to build and assemble and, like, have things not rattle apart. You know? You have to have electrical engineers that know how to build circuit boards and all these kinds of things. And then you obviously need software engineers who know how to actually write the code that makes these things work. And software engineering spans everything from, you know, low level microcontroller firmware up to at scale cloud software. And then on top of all that, there's all the operations behind it, which is often forgotten about. And so we very early, were able to assemble a team that were expert in doing a lot of these different verticals and had also experience, like, kind of, like, cross functionally working with those different expertises, like, in their past, you know, lives. And so I think it's the team. It's, like, the short answer of that. And it's very powerful when you can have a small team of people that know how to do a lot of different things because we don't have as many, things fall through the cracks. And so it's built... It's this very tightly coupled, organization, and I think it's part of why we've been able to build so much without, you know, needing to raise a billion dollars or something crazy. Well...
00:56:46 · Eugene Demetri
[00:56:46] S3: And Point One's been around for about ten years. So... And you've been putting in the work and putting in the effort, you know, even going back to the the challenge that you mentioned earlier. But what... Why is it growing so fast right now? What's what's going on? What's in the water that everyone's drinking?
00:57:03 · Aaron Nathan
[00:57:03] S2: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely been an inflection point, and I think there's a few factors that contribute to it. I mean, first of all, like, the nature of our business, especially the early parts of RTK, were that you needed to get to a certain level of scale to be able to service, like, a consumer business. Right? Like, when you buy your BOA at Home Depot, I can't, like, guess if we're gonna have coverage when you take it home. We just have to know that. And so there was a level of critical scale that we hit, and that was that was a big transition for us about, I'd say, like, three years ago where we had, you know, one of the largest professionally run corrections networks out there. Now the other thing that we've done and seen is that physical AI or, you know, whatever we love to call it now, it's gone from something that was like, hey. We can cool... Do all these cool demos in the lab to these things are actually working and delivering value. And we're seeing it, I think, in two contexts. There are some consumer use cases, like the lawnmowers that are at scale. I would argue that not self driving cars quite yet, because those are still relatively small, but the high levels of advanced driver assistance that we see, has been another huge area of consumer. And then when you go into the industrial sector, which is where, like, the vast majority of our customers are, it's just like these point solutions have just delivered so much value, like, in agriculture, you know, being able to do, like, weeding really well for lettuce. You know? It's like, that's a big deal. And so we we just see that, like, the applications are working, and so that's putting demand on us. And it's resulted, like, just in the last year, I think we've 10 x ed the number of customers that we actually have. And that's that's just, like, a really amazing stat, especially given, like, I don't think the market's slowing down. Like, if anything, it's continuing to accelerate. The other piece that's really interesting for us is that all of these, customers, like, the deployments are still relatively small in the industrial sector, but they're growing very quickly. So they're seeing, like, this high level of adoption as they're moving from, like, pilots to actual, like, being rolled out across, you know, multiple facilities, etcetera. So, yeah, all great tailwinds.
00:59:30 · Eugene Demetri, Aaron Nathan
[00:59:30] S3: Yeah. Well, you talked about that 10x growth. I know Point One raised 35,000,000 in series c funding led by CrossLab Ventures. What does that enable as you as you continue scaling up? [00:59:42] S2: Yeah. So one of the big things that we've been doing is trying to get into more markets. So, you know, obviously, we started here in The US. That's... We're headquartered in San Francisco. And then since then, you know, we've really put a lot of effort into global expansion. So we just actually announced a large partnership with Orange, who's one of the largest telcos in Europe and, frankly, around the world. And, you know, we're also doing, you know, business in Asia and, like, trying to figure out how do we actually solve this problem not just from a US perspective, but actually have, like, a global solution because we've seen, actually, our technology is most valuable to the biggest companies who actually are thinking at a global scale. And this is really, like, I think, a great thing for us as a business because we're now able to go in and say, yes. We have something that will work in US, in Europe, in Japan, you know, in South Korea, in New Zealand, in Australia, and, you know, we're expanding even beyond just that. And I think that's, that's a really powerful value proposition when you're trying to make a product that serves all those markets.