Announcing a new Circuit Launch location in partnership with Singularity University
We're returning to the original home of Silicon Valley Robotics! Plus lessons from some funded robotics startups.
Exciting Announcement: Circuit Launch Opens New Location in Mountain View, California in Partnership with Singularity University
We are excited to announce that Circuit Launch is expanding its community with the opening of a new location in Mountain View, California. This venture, in partnership with Singularity University, will further our mission of empowering the next generation of technology pioneers.
Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, this new space will offer advanced facilities, coworking spaces, and opportunities for entrepreneurs, startups, and industry leaders to collaborate on projects in robotics, AI, and emerging technologies.
This partnership with Singularity University will bring unique educational and networking opportunities, combining Circuit Launch's expertise in hardware innovation with Singularity's forward-thinking approach to technology's future.
Stay tuned for more details about the grand opening and upcoming events. We look forward to welcoming you to this new hub of innovation and creativity in Mountain View.
#CircuitLaunchMountainView #InnovationHub #SingularityUniversity #TechFuture
Where is it? 599 Fairchild Dr Mountain View, the previous home of Hacker Dojo and then Boston Dynamics! And also where Silicon Valley Robotics had our first office.
Humanoids Summit - First exhibitors and speakers Announced!
Silicon Valley Robotics is proud to be the strategic advisor for the first Humanoids Summit, Dec 11th and 12th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
The first speakers to be announced include Jonathan Hurst from Agility Robotics. You’ll also meed 1X, Apptronik, Kind Humanoids, Engineered Arts, Enchanted Tools and Hanson Robotics. And we’re just getting started.
The Summit has expanded to three tracks in order to accommodate more stellar speakers and exhibitors, and if you’re a Silicon Valley Robotics member you get a great discount on exhibiting and attending.
Jobs in Robotics!
We’ll be posting more jobs in robotics next week from Silicon Valley Robotics member companies and I think the click rate was pretty good. Our readers are primarily robotics professionals and the variation of clicks between different jobs show that people were being selective about what jobs they wanted to apply for.
Please send me your job links!
Startup Stuff
Sarjoun Skaff cofounder of BossaNova Robotics, one of the first retail robots, has some great insights about the fundraising and company building process.
If you're a seed-stage founder struggling to raise Series A, read on. Our fundraising experience at Bossa Nova may provide helpful insights.
In 2013, we started developing robotics and AI to automate the management of on-shelf inventory, and were an immediate hit with customers. We had four big-name retailers paying six-figure NRE fees for the privilege of testing our shelf-scanning prototypes. Fundraising should have been a cake walk, right? The market wanted it, the business case was clear, little-to-no competition...
And yet, for the life of us, we couldn't interest investors. For a painful year, my cofounder Martin Hitch and I racked our brains - why not? We kept tweaking the pitch, asking for feedback, and invariably getting the infamous "too early" rejection.
Our Dec 2014 iteration fixed the problem. We had been describing the product chronologically - deploy a robot, capture data, AI analyzes the data, API delivers actionable insights, associates restock shelves, sales increase. We'd even demonstrated the robot live.
The fix was to simply switch the order of the slides - start with the data and relegate the robot to its data collection function. We tested the new pitch with an investor without any slides, just talking through the narrative. The investor had rejected us twice before, but this time we went straight to the investment committee. We stopped bringing the robot altogether and soon received term sheets from multiple name-brand investors. My favorite investor actually needed only 20 minutes to decide: "Oh, if you build it, they will buy! I'm in."
In hindsight, we understood that the complexity and capital inefficiency of the robot was blocking investors from hearing the rest of the story. Relegating it to the back of the presentation finally allowed our audience to hear the pitch.
10 years on, the investor community's position on hardware has evolved, so our example may no longer apply directly. However, it is still true that what matters isn't what you say, it's what your audience hears. If your pitch isn't working, but you're confident in the business, don't give up. Keep iterating and you'll get there.
I've anonymized both pitches, if you'd like to take a look (these PDFs lack Keynote's snazzy animations):
- $5M pitch that did NOT work: https://lnkd.in/eFXzNXkv
- $10M pitch that did: https://lnkd.in/eqcdHxXw
Revisiting these pitches makes me cringe - we truly were naive. We did experience the hockey stick we predicted, but it took 2X longer and 5X more capital than we thought. Sometimes being naive is an advantage - we wouldn't have built Bossa Nova (and enjoyed its exhilarating highs) if we knew how hard it would be.
If this post proves helpful, I'll share more lessons and documents, so please let me know. Sarjoun Skaff
Send me your community news to share!
Robot News
Amazon unveils the next generation of fulfillment centers powered by AI and 10 times more robotics - Amazon
Amazon says new technology in delivery vans will help sort packages on the fly and save time - APNews
Amazon Robotics Revolution: Transforming Fulfillment Centers to Enhance Efficiency - PYMNTS
Amazon’s Tye Brady discusses the next generation of robotics warehouses - TechCrunch
Meet the 8 robots powering your package delivery - Amazon
Robots facilitate communication, quality on building sites: ICBA Summit Speaker Tessa Lau - Construct Central
AI-Driven Robotics Startup Haber Nets Raises USD 38 Mn Funding Led by Creaegis, with Support from Accel and BEENEXT - Entrepreneur India
Elon Musk plays a familiar song: Robot cars are coming - WSJ
What Elon Missed: Successful Innovation is Built on Trust - Forbes
Meet Tesla’s Optimus Robot, Humanoid ‘Friend’ who can do anything - NDTV World
Elon Musk shares his vision for Optimus robots at ‘We, Robot’ event - CNET
Casio made a furry robot designed to cuddle and calm you down - The Verge
Engineers create 1st robots capable of complex actions without electricity - Interesting Engineering
‘Very clever’ fluid circuits could solve soft robot challenges - Institute of Mechanical Engineers
Inside the world’s first humanoid robot factory, where robots could eventually build themselves - CNBC
Agility Robotics, maker of humanoid robots, shows off its first robofab - Bloomberg
Corvus robotics brings autonomous inventory management system to lights-out warehouses - Commercial UAV News
The robots are coming… to cut your grocery bill - AEIorg
At a Brooklyn warehouse, robots are reshaping the grocery delivery business - WSJ
Save-A-Lot entering New York via micro-fulfillment center - ChainStoreAge
Save-A-Lot opens Brooklyn automated grocery delivery hub in Brooklyn, promising affordable prices and quick service - Brooklyn Paper
Navigating Robotics Through the Political Landscape - The Robot Report
Data centers will play a big role in this Sterling startup’s growth. Amazon just backed it - Biz Journal DCInno
ABB Robotics, Molg partner to create robotic microfactories - engineering.com
Lume Robotics, bringing customisable autonomy to Brazilian mining - International Mining
Strawberry picking robot to speed up harvest, tackle labor shortage - Food Manufacturing
Prototype agribot promises to cut costs and tackle labor shortages - The Engineer
Kubota North Amercia acquires Bloomfield Robotics - PR Newswire
Farmers aren’t buying today’s agribotics model and you shouldn’t either - AgFunderNews
Robot Events
FIRA is back! October 22-24 Woodland CA
🚀 hashtag#FIRAUSA24: Unveiling the Future of AgTech!
🧑🌾 FIRA USA event: October 22-24
🌟 Highlights:
• Unparalleled networking for farmers, manufacturers, and scientists
• In-field demos of cutting-edge autonomous solutions
• Business meetings and research discussions
• Focus on specialty crops: vegetables, vines, fruit, and nut trees
Don't miss this opportunity to shape the future of agriculture!
🔗 Register now: https://lnkd.in/eHJDFK3F
The local events I’m going to be at…
RobOpsCon 2024 - Mountain View - Oct 15
SVR Robotics Investment Summit - Nov 1st
Stanford Robotics Center Opening - Nov 2nd - by invitation only
Humanoid Robotics Summit - Mountain View - Dec 11 - 12, with SVR Robotics Entrepreneur Workshop on Dec 13 - get the news first here :)
And some more robotics conferences (and I’ll see you at CSAIL, BARS, ROSCon, Masters&Robots, ICSR and more tbd):
SOSV Climate Tech Summit Oct 14 - Oct 18
IROS 2024 AbuDhabi Oct 14 - Oct 18
RobOpsCon 2024 - Mountain View - Oct 15
ROSCon Odense DK Oct 21 - Oct 23
Masters&Robots Warsaw Poland Oct 22 - Oct 23
ROS Industrial Conference Odense DK Oct 24 - Oct 25
ICSR+AI Odense DK Oct 24 - Oct 26
CORL Munich DE Nov 6 - Nov 9
IEEE Future of Telepresence Pasadena CA Nov 16 - Nov 17
Humanoids 2024 Nancy FR Nov 26 - Nov 28
ISRR - 40th Anniversary - Long Beach CA Dec 8 - Dec 12
2025
HRI 2025 Melbourne Australia March 4 - March 6
ProMat 2025 Chicago IL Mar 17 - Mar 20
ICRA 2025 Atlanta Georgia 17 May - 23 May 2025
Thanks Andra for sharing this valuable information! It could be important for Founders have the experience of successfull cases as Sarjoun Skaff, so if you can share more it will be very usefull for us. i.e. YC cases, Teach Stars, and so on.