I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
My guess would be that big German companies like to sell and insure their industrial equipment wholesale. For example, if you buy stuff from Siemens, everything in the factory must be as per how the applications engineer described it - which is to mean you have to buy everything from them and set it up exactly as they want - otherwise there goes your insurance/warranty.
This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
I think a more pressing question is why businesses all over, but especially in America, are so obsessed with cost-cutting to the exclusion of everything else that they're openly, predictably setting up said business to implode once the wrong people leave.
Like I dunno, being a pink-haired lesbian communist I am, I'm somewhat suspect of my own opinions, but that said, I personally have no problem seeing that investing in your employees is probably a good idea if you want your business to remain sustainable for the long-haul. But nowadays all corporate leadership is fixated on the next handful of quarters at most. The less-skilled only on the next quarter and no further. I don't personally think capitalism and corporations are good ideas in general, but they also seem to be failing quite spectacularly at their own stated advantages at this point which I don't think gets brought up enough.
It’s weird that people are celebrating the end of Europe here every day because they „killed themselves with regulations” but one German company does well and it’s a mass freak out?
Because it's always extremes in the media? One day Germany is on the brink of collapse because so called economic scientists (in Germany we have a group of them working for the government that are colloquially called "sages" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachverst%C3%A4ndigenrat_zur_B...) predict zero growth. Next week suddenly it's a boom because other so called economic scientists predict a GDP growth of 0.2%
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
The manufacturing is more important than the automation, that’s how Midea was able to buy KUKA.
Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.
Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.
>What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
> Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Saw a major brewery that operated like this too. Flew in Belgian technicians to do the really valuable work.
The US government spends $1.4T on education. They already invest more than anyone else. That spending may not be productive but no one can credibly say the US hasn't spent enough money on education.
You must be insane to think that investment is happening in Germany. We have negative real economic growth, by far the worst of all EU countries.
Your contractors made so much not because they are from Germany but because they were freelancers. And if they weren't, they probably had less take-home pay after taxes than your father had, despite the company paying 3 times as much. I'm an engineer with 10 years experience and I make 65k _before_ taxes. Barely over 3k net per month. Many others would be happy to even have a job in the current economic climate. And before you Americans come with "muh free health care": I wait 9 months for an appointment and paid almost 10k last year out of pocket for orthopedic work.
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
Yeah well HN is predominantly for and by American audiences I think and that already explains a lot of the attitude towards non-USA. A lot of Americans seem to think they are the main character in every story, and even if they are not, they try their best to somehow alter the narrative until they are.
The CEO did move to the US “to focus on the fastest growing market”. Usually that means that they start building an engineering org there and embracing a more US working culture.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
IDK why all these replies are assuming OP was insinuating some negative judgement. To me, it's interesting that US investors are apparently interested in this EU firm that is pursuing the US market, despite no shortage of US startups in the same space.
No need to be defensive. It's simply true, and I say that as a European. The money and attitude required for it is just not present in Europe. German money is much more conservative and risk averse. So the funding will have to be from the US. It's perfectly justified to roll one's eyes when these cases are presented as if Europe could produce these companies by itself.
The risk of having primarily foreign, especially American, investors is that the company will leave the EU. Like what we just saw happen with Heart Aerospace [1]. EU needs its own investors.
yes, but valuations are dogshit, which means capital is scarce, runways are too short, products end up so-so, and startups fail before they gain mindshare, not to mention the long enterprise sales cycles
Money is effectively global these days. A lot of the money in the AI bubble is from all over the place, including Saudi funds and the ubiquitous Softbank.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
What does "from USA" actually mean? Say I'm a European investor, I've invested my European-earned salary into a company with their HQ in Europe, registered in Delaware. Lets say that money 10x, is that money "from Europe" or "from USA"? Does the paying user-base geolocation matter or what is it that matters to you here, where the business is registered, actually located or something else?
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
I'm not sure a robotic bricklayer is going to open up construction to anyone who doesn't otherwise have expertise in the area. You still need design/engineering/permitting etc. The robot just replaces the grunt work.
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details. This honestly looks more like an advertisement, which doesn't tell me much about how progress is going.
Two aspects: industry & research (worked in both).
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
Even if VLA reaches 100% success rate it still isn't viable. No factory operator wants a cloud hosted model in the critical path. And nobody is (yet) building a server rack that can be air gapped in the factory to run VLA, and these models don't run on a Mac Mini. Probably an opportunity for something like Oxide to pick up, but they have more profitable segments to go after.
A couple decades ago, in Brazil, the parking lot used next to a popular Microsoft training center was called South Park. The contact e-mail was "cartman@southpark.com.br".
> Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
Good thing then that the chancellor cannot just introduce laws in Germany then. One of the perks of having actual democratic institutions that aren’t just for show.
robotics-as-a-service makes the upfront cost easier, but downtime is still the factory's problem. i'd be more interested in the service contract and recovery time than the valuation.
I remember few years ago couple of German fintech startups reached more than 1B$ valuation. Had it been the case in US, those startups would have gone IPOs and started expanding worldwide.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
> Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
What was that US robotics startup that got tons of press like a decade ago for their "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions? It had a goofy LCD face, I want to say the co. was called US Robotics or something but changed their name, all I’m finding is the modem company though.
> What was that US robotics startup ... "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions?
You're probably thinking of Rethink Robotics in Boston.
Its first model was the two-arm "Baxter", very popular at universities and research labs. The second model was the single-armed Sawyer, much more capable, with built-in vision, which sold several thousand units to small manufacturers.
Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks. The robots were originally built in the Boston location, and later by a contract manufacturer in New Hampshire. In 2018, the company was unable to find a buyer and shut down operations. The brand and the remaining inventory was purchased by a German distributor, but eventually the robots were sunset, afaik.
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
Nothing about Europe's policy has been realistic for decades now. The whole of Europe is a vassal of the US and exists at the mercy of the Americans. If they withdraw support Europe is no longer viable.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
Definitely not.
I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins.
Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
If it would work, it would be mildly useful. Actually, if it would work, that would be more exciting by itself than it would be useful.
But it doesn’t, really.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
China seems to be good at all of the above.
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Engineering salaries in the EU are far lower than in the US though.
They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
Based on what data? A quick google search says the average automation engineer in Germany makes 90k euro to $107k in the US.
And the German has universal healthcare, clocks out at 5 and can’t be bothered, and gets real vacation time.
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/automation-engineer/
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My guess would be that big German companies like to sell and insure their industrial equipment wholesale. For example, if you buy stuff from Siemens, everything in the factory must be as per how the applications engineer described it - which is to mean you have to buy everything from them and set it up exactly as they want - otherwise there goes your insurance/warranty.
This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.
Globe-trotting contractors are probably well-paid specialists. GP is probably not commenting on the German labor market.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
German engineering salaries are definitely not cheaper. If you want cheaper then hire people from Poland, Romania or even Spain, Portugal.
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They make less money as salary but aren't cheaper overall when you take into account all the other expenses and regulations.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
I think a more pressing question is why businesses all over, but especially in America, are so obsessed with cost-cutting to the exclusion of everything else that they're openly, predictably setting up said business to implode once the wrong people leave.
Like I dunno, being a pink-haired lesbian communist I am, I'm somewhat suspect of my own opinions, but that said, I personally have no problem seeing that investing in your employees is probably a good idea if you want your business to remain sustainable for the long-haul. But nowadays all corporate leadership is fixated on the next handful of quarters at most. The less-skilled only on the next quarter and no further. I don't personally think capitalism and corporations are good ideas in general, but they also seem to be failing quite spectacularly at their own stated advantages at this point which I don't think gets brought up enough.
It’s weird that people are celebrating the end of Europe here every day because they „killed themselves with regulations” but one German company does well and it’s a mass freak out?
Because it's always extremes in the media? One day Germany is on the brink of collapse because so called economic scientists (in Germany we have a group of them working for the government that are colloquially called "sages" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachverst%C3%A4ndigenrat_zur_B...) predict zero growth. Next week suddenly it's a boom because other so called economic scientists predict a GDP growth of 0.2%
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
He switched to software.
OP made clear they were talking about automation engineers, not test or design jobs.
The manufacturing is more important than the automation, that’s how Midea was able to buy KUKA.
Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.
Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.
>What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
> I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
A tell-tale sign that you're touching the third rail.
> Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Saw a major brewery that operated like this too. Flew in Belgian technicians to do the really valuable work.
Invest in proper education first. The USA has been dropping the ball consistently over the last decades.
The US government spends $1.4T on education. They already invest more than anyone else. That spending may not be productive but no one can credibly say the US hasn't spent enough money on education.
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I think we spend about half of state budgets on education actually.
You must be insane to think that investment is happening in Germany. We have negative real economic growth, by far the worst of all EU countries.
Your contractors made so much not because they are from Germany but because they were freelancers. And if they weren't, they probably had less take-home pay after taxes than your father had, despite the company paying 3 times as much. I'm an engineer with 10 years experience and I make 65k _before_ taxes. Barely over 3k net per month. Many others would be happy to even have a job in the current economic climate. And before you Americans come with "muh free health care": I wait 9 months for an appointment and paid almost 10k last year out of pocket for orthopedic work.
This just shows you how evil and greedy companies such as Amazon are.
And how much they lie, too. After all Trump promised to bring jobs to the USA. Well, he lied. And so did Amazon etc...
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More like in turkey amirite lol
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
What share of the investor money is from USA?
Being EU company is so hard, you can never pass the purity tests.
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
It's just weird attitude.
Yeah well HN is predominantly for and by American audiences I think and that already explains a lot of the attitude towards non-USA. A lot of Americans seem to think they are the main character in every story, and even if they are not, they try their best to somehow alter the narrative until they are.
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The CEO did move to the US “to focus on the fastest growing market”. Usually that means that they start building an engineering org there and embracing a more US working culture.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
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It matters who owns the company. Where your employees come from matters much less.
As long as there is no investors from Europe, these startups will just be a money funnel to America.
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IDK why all these replies are assuming OP was insinuating some negative judgement. To me, it's interesting that US investors are apparently interested in this EU firm that is pursuing the US market, despite no shortage of US startups in the same space.
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No need to be defensive. It's simply true, and I say that as a European. The money and attitude required for it is just not present in Europe. German money is much more conservative and risk averse. So the funding will have to be from the US. It's perfectly justified to roll one's eyes when these cases are presented as if Europe could produce these companies by itself.
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It's an old world attitude.
Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Promus are American. Greenfield is Israeli, and Kindred Capital is British.
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
Technically, this doesn't answer the question, which was about investment money, not about the investment firms.
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I don’t know what the point is that you’re hinting at?
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
The risk of having primarily foreign, especially American, investors is that the company will leave the EU. Like what we just saw happen with Heart Aerospace [1]. EU needs its own investors.
[1] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
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yes, but valuations are dogshit, which means capital is scarce, runways are too short, products end up so-so, and startups fail before they gain mindshare, not to mention the long enterprise sales cycles
I don’t know what the point is that you’re making.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
Money is effectively global these days. A lot of the money in the AI bubble is from all over the place, including Saudi funds and the ubiquitous Softbank.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
What does "from USA" actually mean? Say I'm a European investor, I've invested my European-earned salary into a company with their HQ in Europe, registered in Delaware. Lets say that money 10x, is that money "from Europe" or "from USA"? Does the paying user-base geolocation matter or what is it that matters to you here, where the business is registered, actually located or something else?
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
Ain't that a kick in the head?
Ain't that a hole in the boat!
that is what a fellow once said
> Robotics-as-a-Service model
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Why not? Extreme superiority of the Chinese supply chain network startup energy price market
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
Imagine a robot bricklayer. Some big construction companies may buy them outright, but for smaller projects, it makes sense to simply rent them.
I'm not sure a robotic bricklayer is going to open up construction to anyone who doesn't otherwise have expertise in the area. You still need design/engineering/permitting etc. The robot just replaces the grunt work.
aaS means you don't even rent them, you just pay someone to come and lay a certain number of bricks by any means necessary.
Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.
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Those have existed for quite a while now. For smaller projects it is cheaper to get a human.
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What is the SOTA in AI for robotics today? Is there much progress? Or is everybody too much focused on the LLMs now?
Why do you think it is separated?
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
And not sure what RobCo is doing exactly, but LLMs are probably part of it as well.
Some further reading on the LLM-and-robotics aspect in addition to your link:
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
https://drivingbench.com/
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Ehm, I didn't say they needed to be separated :)
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details. This honestly looks more like an advertisement, which doesn't tell me much about how progress is going.
Two aspects: industry & research (worked in both).
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
Even if VLA reaches 100% success rate it still isn't viable. No factory operator wants a cloud hosted model in the critical path. And nobody is (yet) building a server rack that can be air gapped in the factory to run VLA, and these models don't run on a Mac Mini. Probably an opportunity for something like Oxide to pick up, but they have more profitable segments to go after.
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Is it really possible that none of the recent crazy robot videos made it to your timeline??
what is it with people choosing evil corpo names
Indeed. The name was well established in the popular Fallout game series before this company was founded.
I mean Microsoft somehow stole Cortana of all things from Halo of all places so…
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Reminded of how someone took "Universal Robotics" from the Asimov novels and used it to sell .. modems.
I guess in this category, those guys are unbeatable: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/
Hahah that's hilarious. It doesn't quite feel like they chose to be explicitly evil like Palantir or Anduril though:
> Why Mordor Intelligence Private Limited is a Great Place To Work
https://www.greatplacetowork.in/great/company/mordor-intelli...
> Pottery Workshop. Roleplays in Entrepreneurship Training
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/about-us/csr
Feels a bit more like some Doctor Who-ish happy-sounding evilcorp than Omni Consumer Products
The fact a defence company is also called Stark is quite amusing, if not for the deadly weapons.
Reminds me of the first time I heard about the "Palantir" company...
Edit : typo
I'm waiting for someone to actually name something "Torment Nexus", which is the name of this phenomena.
Evil often wins and makes a lot of money. Also effective if your target audience is evil billionaires with brain rot.
this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?
It doesn't sound evil but is a evil company in the Fallout video games and tv show
I will name my company BlackApex Inc
Effective in this attention economy.
Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.
But maybe most people don't have half a brain.
A couple decades ago, in Brazil, the parking lot used next to a popular Microsoft training center was called South Park. The contact e-mail was "cartman@southpark.com.br".
Is Robert House involved?
MMMM CHIP.
I wonder if these stocks are just insane, the evaluations have been so high on many things. Where is even the money coming from that determines it?
The money came from:
> Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
Surely you can cite the study
Well, it seems their fastest growing market (and largest?) is in the USA.
They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.
The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.
Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t it a similar market?
Who is dismissing it?
People here work in the US tech bubble. The behavior you describe is indicative of fear.
news.ycombinator.eu
SCNR
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Good thing then that the chancellor cannot just introduce laws in Germany then. One of the perks of having actual democratic institutions that aren’t just for show.
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robotics-as-a-service makes the upfront cost easier, but downtime is still the factory's problem. i'd be more interested in the service contract and recovery time than the valuation.
I remember few years ago couple of German fintech startups reached more than 1B$ valuation. Had it been the case in US, those startups would have gone IPOs and started expanding worldwide.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
> Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
That's very european. Even the ones who invest in stock mostly choose US tech stocks to get some double digit growth.
Here’s the source( https://www.statista.com/statistics/1365598/stock-ownership-...). In comparison the percentage in US is more than 65%.
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
Why exactly is a >1B valuation necessary to expand worldwide?
First thing that came to mind. I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/RobCo_Industries
I’d like my Pip-Boy in matte black please.
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
What was that US robotics startup that got tons of press like a decade ago for their "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions? It had a goofy LCD face, I want to say the co. was called US Robotics or something but changed their name, all I’m finding is the modem company though.
> What was that US robotics startup ... "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions?
You're probably thinking of Rethink Robotics in Boston.
Its first model was the two-arm "Baxter", very popular at universities and research labs. The second model was the single-armed Sawyer, much more capable, with built-in vision, which sold several thousand units to small manufacturers.
Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks. The robots were originally built in the Boston location, and later by a contract manufacturer in New Hampshire. In 2018, the company was unable to find a buyer and shut down operations. The brand and the remaining inventory was purchased by a German distributor, but eventually the robots were sunset, afaik.
Discussion then:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35305141
Baxter by Rethink Robotics.
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
Isn't the $1B unicorn number from like 2015? I feel like that's a pretty typical series A/B valuation at this point.
There are under 2k private unicorns so it’s still a worthwhile metric. $1B is a proper business.
The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited.
2k private unicorns that's less than individual billionaires. Interesting.
>"The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited."
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
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For Silicon Valley, maybe. But this is Europe, where things are still rooted in reality.
Nothing about Europe's policy has been realistic for decades now. The whole of Europe is a vassal of the US and exists at the mercy of the Americans. If they withdraw support Europe is no longer viable.
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really putting on the petal to the metal for reaching 2077
so the website is basically called it physical AI
Hype for the inevitable NYSE IPO!
Capital Markets union is coming :-)
Cries in dystopian
Just as long as the CEO’s name isn’t Robert House, I guess
"But autocracy? Firm control in the hands of a technological and economic visionary? Yes, that Vegas shall have."
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Robocop is missing a 'p'. And one 'o'.
Weren't germans so accurate in the past? The AI slop degrades all quality.
I prefer the variant in the movie from 1987.
I was expecting to be disappointed at seeing another humanoid robot that can fold laundry BS startup.
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
folding laundry is not useful?
Definitely not. I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins. Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
It would be. But it also feels like the "Can it run Crysis?" of robotics.
By the time we get robots capable of folding laundry, we'd already have solved many, many other use-cases.
If it would work, it would be mildly useful. Actually, if it would work, that would be more exciting by itself than it would be useful. But it doesn’t, really.
Better to put the items on hangers.
It is about as useful as robot that chews your food for you
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
> I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.
I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.
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Will this also be a Russian scam?
What is this a reference to?
Wirecard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal
How dare you!
Germans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).
Or AfD
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They are going hard with the downvotes, maybe they should be as self righteous when it comes to not committing fraud at a national level for once
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