Driving Business

Congratulations! You’ve successfully launched your product, shipping dozens of systems to satisfied customers, and word is spreading that your solution is a gamechanger. However, one question keeps you up at night: as your product continues to gain traction and mass production becomes necessary, how will you deliver? Missing production goals at this stage could be costly, and quality issues could tarnish your brand and alienate your valuable new customers.

Will you ask your engineers to work graveyard and weekend shifts? Will you lease a new building and hire an entirely new manufacturing team? Or does it make more sense to turn to a value-add contract manufacturer who is an expert in quality control, supply chain management, assembly, and testing?

Starting a robotics company, as well as growing and scaling, has many challenges. The Robotics Startup Bootcamp Part 1 will share best practices for many of the common challenges that can make or break a company. Experts will speak about topics that include:

– Customer discovery
– Developing a sales pipeline
– Intellectual property and trademarks
– Media and marketing 101
– Working with corporate partners
– How to fund your startup

There are opportunities all around us to enhance our lives by deploying robotics and automation. Many of these opportunities are beyond the bounds of traditional factory automation, and they are very exciting. In the past decade, our industry has seen hundreds of startups and corporate R&D initiatives attempt to tackle this, but very few clear winners have emerged successfully.

Dave Coleman, CEO of PickNik Robotics, will share his observations from consulting with 100+ robotics companies over the past decade about what he’s seen work and not work. From business risks to technology pitfalls, be prepared for some common startup perspectives and unique robotics industry insights. A primary focus will be on applications that leverage robotic arms, but the learnings will be generalizable to mobile robots, drones, and more.

This panel will bring together investors and roboticists to discuss the challenges and opportunities of raising money for your robotics company. This panel will discuss the current state of robotics investments, macro trends, how the landscape has changed, what applications and technologies are finding commercial success and more.

More speakers to come.

The Robotics Startup Bootcamp Part 2 will include fireside chats with founders who have raised funds and scaled their business. Discussions will include the role of accelerators, fundraising, hiring and team growth, and scaling to net positive revenue.

This conference will focus on the business opportunities in educational robotics and how many educational components, such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, have transcended their initial purpose and are now widely used in industry, particularly in developing countries. We will explore how components originally designed for learning environments have proven to be valuable industrial tools, opening new markets and applications. The discussion will highlight the potential for developers of robotics hardware to expand their reach by investing in educational technologies that build long-term consumer loyalty. This call to action encourages hardware developers to recognize the immense market potential within educational robotics, as early adoption in schools often leads to widespread use in industrial applications in emerging economies.

Taking robots from controlled pilot environments to real-world deployment presents a significant hurdle. White initial deployments often occur in controlled environments, the subsequent “messy middle” phase exposes them to varying environmental factors and levels of human interaction. This transition presents several challenges that must be overcome to effectively scale a fleet.

First, moving away from custom solutions for individual robots and toward standardized designs and methods for a fleet. Second, gaining customer buy-in requires developing a deep and thorough understanding of each customer’s unique needs. This includes their particular environment, labor structure, and deployment preferences. Finally, data overload can become a trap. While monitoring KPIs is essential, getting bogged down in data analysis during software updates and iteration can hinder progress. The inability to quickly iterate and test solutions can impact productivity and risks misalignment over Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with customers.

Drawing on extensive experience scaling robot fleets, Joe Wieciek, Director of Technical Operations at Outrider, shares his practical strategies to ensure your robotic fleet delivers consistent value to customers. He will discuss how to navigate the complexities of cradle-to-grave deployment to effectively scale past the pilot phase. Attendees will learn:
– Why adopting a standardized, ‘cattle, not pets’ approach simplifies the logistics of your fleet and optimizes it for deployment
– Strategies for building mutually beneficial partnerships with your customers and being attentive to their unique needs
– How to leverage proactive monitoring to identify issues quickly, roll out solutions, and maximize value for you and your customer

It’s predicted that by 2030, over 1 million mobile robots will be in the field. However, implementation is still complex and the cost of robot downtime is estimated to range from $1,000 to $10,000 per minute. With AI and SLAM systems struggling with real-world variability, what are the real challenges in understanding the total cost of ownership?

For mobile robots to be feasible and improve operational efficiency customers need performance in real-world environments at an acceptable cost. By focusing on reducing BoM, teams are making trade-off decisions on performance, while simultaneously incurring silent costs that are not measured or managed. To make the right decisions we should all be focusing on the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). BoM is just one important part in a life cycle of costs required to develop, set up, maintain and update an autonomy solution. Yet often it is the main or only cost factor considered in purchasing decisions.

Understanding and measuring TCO is tough. Doing so however, creates a path to long term scalable profits and a more competitive product. This talk will explain why autonomy is at the heart of TCO, what costs are secretly undermining margin and customer experience, and how you can measure and solve these issues.

Ilia Baranov, Co-Founder and CEO of Polymath Robotics, will share war stories and strategies to launch a small robotics effort as a SaaS-focused company. He will discuss what Polymath Robotics has built so far, where it is going, what is going on in the funding market, and where the larger community is moving.

In 2024, $4.5B has been invested in robotics YTD, and currently trending toward ~$2.5B/quarter. It might look like there’s been a bounce-back from 2023, in which robotics received $7.5B in VC funding for the full year. However, a lot of the $4.5B in 2024 was driven by Figure ($675M) and Wayve ($1B). To some extent, companies are leveraging modern AI are still hot and those that aren’t are facing lots of headwinds.

This presentation will provide insight and analysis on how investor sentiment has evolved from enthusiastic to cautious, where investors were investing, where investors are investing now and what this means for the future funding of robotics companies.