INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Gideon Brothers, an ambitious startup out of Croatia that is building autonomous robots to put to work in warehouses and other industrial
logistics, has quietly raised $765,000 in funding.The round is led by TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, who has become an
increasingly active investor, recently backing fintech Cleo, legal tech startup Juro, and satellite company Open Cosmos
editor David Rowan and a number of unnamed Croatian angels have also participated in Gideon Brothers& seed round.Founded in early 2017 and
comprising a 40-plus team of deep learning and robotics experts — which includes 5 PhDs and 27 Masters of Hardware and Software
engineering and other related disciplines — the company is developing an AI-powered robot for various industrial applications.Dubbed &The
Brain,& the technology combines 3D computer vision and deep learning to enable Gideon Brothers& robots to be aware of their environment and
operate autonomously, similar to self-driving vehicles.&We have been developing a technology we call a ‘robot brain&,& co-founder and CEO
&We believe that robots of the future will rely on the same type of vision that you and I rely on, which is basically stereo vision
We&ve deployed deep learning on top of stereo vision to give our robots a new type of perception of their environment&.The startup first
product is described as an &autonomous and modular intralogistics robot& that is capable of safely handling large pallets in manufacturing,
warehouse and commercial environments
It is designed to work alongside humans, with minimal changes to a facility, negating the need for prohibitively expensive retrofitting or
investing in brand new robot-enabled buildings, which is the route that Amazon has gone down.More broadly, Gideon Brothers wants to help
address current labour shortages in industrial logistics
Citing a research brief by DHL, Gideon Brothers says that demand for supply chain professionals exceeds supply by a ratio of six to one
The work is often painstakingly dull and physically demanding, meaning that turnover can be as high as 40 percent.&[We use] a combination of
camera-based 3D vision, primarily powered by deep learning algorithms to make sure that our robot, whatever it ends up doing, is aware of
its surroundings and the dynamics that exist in these old school industrial facilities which are not highly structured or highly organised
like, for example, e-commerce environments are,& adds Kopic.&We are targeting the remaining 90 percent of the world industrial facilities
that are completely old school, traditional and centered around human beings as the drivers of those facilities and the business model&.In
practice, this means that instead of workers rushing around a warehouse taking orders from a computer-generated voice or a scanner, and then
moving several tons of product around (the so-called &man-to-goods& model), the Gideon Brothers& robot brings the goods to the worker
It receives instructions from the Gideon Brothers fleet management system, which is integrated into an operator Warehouse Management
System.&It goes to the pallet position it has been sent to, lifts it off the frame it is sitting on and transports the entire pallet to a
commissioning or &picking& area where workers take the product that need to be packed onto another customer-specific pallet
The robot then returns the original pallet back to its original position & autonomously and safely
The workers don&t have to zoom around and can focus on more complex tasks like picking,& explains Kopic.If all of that sounds incredibly
ambitious for a European startup that has raised less than $1 million, it because it is
However, Kopic says that by setting up shop in Croatia he has been able to recruit a very specialist team while keeping costs much lower
It also has the advantage of being close to a number of facilities where the startup is currently testing its robots, including being given
access to much-needed warehouse logistics data.Investor Hinrikus echoes this sentiment
&[Gideon Brothers is] building a killer deep tech team
This will be the best team of deep tech talent to the east from here (well, before we get to China),& he tells me.
