INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Every once in a while, a college student or recent graduate dares to launch a robotics startup and
everything goes as well as could be expected
Such is the case, for example, with Alex Rodrigues and Brandon Moak, two former University of Waterloo students who worked on self-driving
technologies together in college and formed their now venture-backed, self-driving truck company, Embark, instead of graduating
(Originally called Varden Labs, the startup’s trip through Y Combinator undoubtedly helped.)
Still, to capture the sustained interest of
robotics investors, it helps to either have experience in a particular industry or to pull in someone, quickly, who does
That much was established yesterday at UC Berkeley, when three veteran investors — Renata Quintini of Lux Capital, Rob Coneybeer of Shasta
Ventures, and Chris Evdemon of Sinovation Ventures — took the stage of a packed Zellerbach Hall to talk about where they’ve invested
previously, and where they are shopping now.
Though the three expressed interest in a wide range of technologies and plenty of optimism
about what’s to come, each lingered a bit on one point in particular, which was the difficulty robotics founders face who are completely
unfamiliar with the particular industry they may hope to reshape with their innovation.
You can catch the entire interview below, but we
thought college students — and their professors and mentors — might want to pay particularly close attention to this concern if
they’re thinking about hitting up investors in the not-too-distant future.
Quintini on how comfortable she and her colleagues at Lux are
when it comes to backing recent college graduates:
What we care the most about what is your unique insight and what do you know about
tackling a certain market or problem that’s not obvious or easy to replicate
In some cases, it’s very fair for someone right out of university who finds a technological breakthrough and
that breakthrough alone is understandable and comprehensible to the market and it’s a very backable company, and we’ve done that in the
past.
But in some cases, and you’ve heard today, [CEO] Patrick [Sobalvarro] from Veo Robotics speak — and [Veo is] actually giving
robotic arms perception sensors to allow people and robots to work together — all his insights came because he came from industry
He was at Rethink Robotics; he’s been in the robotics industry, selling to people who use robots as part of the manufacturing process
And so he actually understands the importance of safety and the selling of those systems to customers
Because he knew that, it made a big difference in how he approaches his go-to-market strategy and how he approaches building a product
And somebody who’s just thinking about, ‘Oh, let me figure out the technology and how to understand when a human is close or not’ and
who didn’t think about the other angle wouldn’t be so successful or differentiated in our opinion.
Coneybeer sounded a similar tone
In fact, when asked if he felt there were other overlooked opportunities like that identified by Veo — which is refitting existing robotic
arms, rather than trying to remake them from scratch — Coneybeer said the most attractive thing of all to him are startups in search of a
problem that actually exists:
What we’re very cognizant of is people who love robots and are trying to invent a market or invent a
need and kind of force fit it, as opposed to people who understand a need and are using robotics as a tool to truly solve that need
That’s a really key differentiator.
We directed an entirely different question to Evdemon, about how Sinovation thinks about domestic
versus industrial robots and whether it expects to commit more capital to one or the other
But Evdemon first took the time to note that the problem of founders who don’t know their industries is a very big one, and deserved more
discussion:
Chiming in to what Renata and Rob were saying, you understated [the issue]
The majority of the teams that we are looking on both the consumer and industrial robot [worlds] at the moment are more of a technology
trying to find a fit in the market, and that’s obviously a very big problem from a venture point of view.
We also see a lot of teams that
are fresh out of school, usually a supervising professor with a couple of his or her PhD students having come across some kind of
technological breakthrough in university and trying to commercialize that
But robotics are all about what sectors they are being applied to
An ag tech team that knows nothing about agriculture, or a security robot that has a team that’s come up with a great computer vision
