These robots could cut delivery costs by 80% | Next Unicorns

Hey everybody, welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. Okay, rewind the clock back to the COVID era. There was a boom in warehouse hiring because we pulled forward quite a lot of e-commerce growth effectively overnight. Now today we hear more about how e-commerce giants are adding automation to their fulfillment systems and really getting a lot of benefits from that— cost control, speed, efficiency. But what about the smaller sellers? Are they reaping the same rewards from automation if they are dependent on existing third-party logistics providers? Maybe not. But there's one startup that wants to change that by bringing a fleet of robots and smart software to a warehouse near you. So please join me in welcoming to the show, it's Kevin Gibbon, the co-founder and CEO of Cytronic. Kevin, how are you?

Great, glad to be back.

This Week in Startups is brought to you by Agree.com. Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack. Go to Agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life. Northwest Registered Agent. Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more with no purchase required. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain. And Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I'm so glad you're here. Now, we've spoken over the years. I've covered a couple of your companies, and it's one, lovely to see you again. Your hair is still in place. How dare you?

It is. It is. So I'm sorry.

But, but why are you doing this again? You, you built Ship, you scaled it, didn't work out the way we wanted it to. Then you built, uh, Air House that you sold to a company last year. And here we are with Citronic. You're taking another bite of this apple. Why is this itch not sated yet inside of you?

I think that building a really great company and, uh, it's just really hard. And I think every single time that I do it, I just learn something new and then I just get interested in where it's kind of pulled me. So I started Ship, uh, what, 13 years ago or something like that.

Yeah.

Um, and it was, I was an eBay power seller and it was just really hard and it was a great consumer shipping service. It was not a great venture-backed business. Um, learned a ton and then took it to Air House where I learned a lot about the warehousing aspect of things. And I was like, well, I don't actually want to have a bunch of like, we had our own warehouses and fleets of couriers at Ship. I'm like, I don't want to deal with the people problem. Like, I'm just going to go just purely software. So Air House was a marketplace for 3PLs. So we would work with the 3PL, we'd figure out which ones are good. And then we had a network across the US and then globally. Uh, and it worked really well. Uh, and then I just kind of like continued to fall into like, what is the big, like this shipping and logistics is a huge, huge category. But like across the board, what is the biggest pain point? And really it's cost. And then with, especially with e-commerce, it's speed. So if you can fundamentally change that in some way, you can like, you can just build something that everybody's gonna want and use. And that's what I kind of like figured out at when we started Cytronic.

Yeah, okay. But also, yes, you can make a good business out of it.

Yes.

But there are some benefits to, I would say, the broader economy at the same time.

Of course.

Because if you can help the smaller seller, the smaller DTC, brand, dare I say even the mom and pop, um, have a fulfillment system that is competitive with what Amazon has built for itself, then they can better compete with the incumbents. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, totally. And, and we see that all the time. Uh, like half our customers right now at Sitronic, uh, they're TikTok sellers. They're people that are just blowing up overnight. So it's, it's really empowering those people, uh, and then scaling with them.

I think we all kind of like look down our nose a little bit at companies that are like big on selling on Instagram, but like, right, how much stuff in your house, dear listener and viewer, Came from Instagram ads.

Exactly.

So none of us can judge. And frankly, these are small businesses. We should support them.

Yes.

And that brings us to what you're actually building with Satronics.

Yes.

So I wanna talk about the robots you have. There's a number of different robots you're bringing to these warehouses that are then essentially orchestrated through software. Yes. It's kind of IRL orchestration. Forget agents for a minute, everybody. We'll talk about the real world today. But I think these are off the shelf. So tell me about which robots you've picked and what they do, and then how they kind of work in concert To replace human labor inside of warehouses.

Right. So it really is, it's physical AI for commerce is what we're building. And it's really looking at a use case that I'm very familiar with, which is e-commerce fulfillment. And really just like thinking through how can you get the cost, how can you actually bend that cost curve? What's available today that wasn't available 2, 5 years ago? And it really is the robotics. And so looking at the different point solutions, like, Any one of these companies independently is not transformative to an individual business, but if you put together enough of them and then manage them as a service, it can become one. So some of the major systems that we have, so we actually do a combination of both buying and also we do some light manufacturing today. That may change as we continue to scale. So we have a robotics team and we do some of this stuff and we have to, or we are like a—

Yeah.

A hardware robotics company at the end of the day, whether we actually buy the robots or we build them, we still need to maintain them and all that stuff. And all the stuff in between.

Yeah, you'd have to have the parts and know-how in-house and also across all of your different warehouses.

Yeah, exactly. So I don't— and even taking it a step further, it's also the real estate side. So what kind of site are you actually going to put these in? So we actually operate micro fulfillment centers. So 30,000 square feet. And because we use robots, we could actually be closer to the city centers. So we don't have to worry about the high labor costs, people traveling. We just have a very— we still do have employees that will do a lot of the managing, but it really enables us to get close to the customer, have a really tight space, and then use a lot of these different robotics. So one of the— there's kind of like 4 different components within our warehouse today, which definitely will change. But again, I think it's really important, and especially for any robotics founder, whoever, you can't do everything with these today. You can't. So like, I kind of stumbled across a use case that is very, very great for robotics. And that is you're taking— a brand has, call it 100 different SKUs.

Sure.

And you store it around typically in a warehouse. And what you need to do is that when the buyers buy something, you need to take those, whatever they've ordered, 3 of A SKU, B SKU, whatever, and you need to collect it and put it into an actual order. So either like a polybag or a box. And so that operation is actually quite expensive on the human side. So it requires, like, if it's a completely non, um, automated warehouse, you have people walking miles per day in these warehouses, and it is still the majority of the market doesn't have any automation at all. And so we're able to take that task that costs like Even the best out there, like in labor costs, like $2.50 per order, that's their cost. That's not what they will charge you. And we're able to take it down to cents with doing the actual robotics. And I could get further into that.

Let me unpack a couple things we're talking about here. So some off-the-shelf robots, some stuff you're working on in-house. And these robots, the idea is essentially robotic automation inside of warehouses and fulfillment. When something arrives at your warehouse, let's say I'm a seller and I'm selling, um, uh, donut keychains.

Yes.

And I, I, I deliver them. Uh, once they get dropped off, are the robots able to essentially handle them from in like intake to storage, to picking, to packaging?

Yeah.

And then to dropping them off into the truck without a human touching them?

So not all of those. No. There, there are some, some pieces. So I'll, I'll break it down. So you, you do, you have the receiving process. That today is like probably the biggest need still for human labor. You have a bunch of different products coming from a bunch of different manufacturers. It's not all the same. It's really hard to automate that. But also, if you look at the percentage of time that actually takes to put it into a storage system, it's not that much. And then the next step is that you store it into whatever racking system you have, and then you have to actually pick things. Um, and so what we use is we use what's called an ASRS system, automatic storage and retrieval system. So there's dozens of these companies worldwide out there. And typically they're only available to like the Walmarts of the world. So Walmart will pay like a, uh, uh, like a systems integrator, probably $50 to $100 million per warehouse. And then they use a combination of these ASRS systems. And then also some of them, not a lot of them, will actually have robotic picking arms, and the actual conveyance and sortation and all of these different pieces. But it's only available to like the largest retailers. It's not— it hasn't even made it into the 3PLs that other smaller companies have done. The 3PL industry is not automated at all. It's just the Walmarts and a lot of these grocery stores. I know it's crazy.

But this is the place where we've seen so much progress in automation. I mean, how many generations of robots has Amazon built to move around its racks inside of its warehouses?

Like, yeah, the problem actually with Amazon is interesting is that they just have too much historical stuff on there. So like everybody points out Amazon is the leader and I would, I'd say hard to argue with that, but they're using a 20-year-old system. Like Kiva Robotics is not the ideal for e-commerce picking. It doesn't make sense. They're literally moving aisles to a picker. Like, think of that for a sec. Like, like it's many, like, like shore warehouse, like, like.

It's like bringing the gas station to the car.

Exactly.

It's like bringing the movie theater to your backyard. Like, what are we doing here?

Exactly. And that's why it looks like chaos in the— well, it looks very nice and it's maybe like an orchestra playing with all of the film and stuff, but it's just a lot of moving stuff and it really is inefficient. That's what it is. And they need thousands of these robots.

Yes.

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But with your system, even with some humans, let's just say in the loop for lack of a better phrase, you can still offer dramatic cost reductions to your customers because you're taking out as much of the human labor as possible. And if anyone listening is concerned about automation killing off human labor, We're automating the worst jobs. Amazon warehouses are not places that are, based on everything that I've read, a lovely place to spend your time. So I think this is a great example of where automation does help a lot. So I'm with you on that. Now, you guys talk about up to 80% cost reductions for your customers.

Yep.

That is a staggering amount of savings. So I'm curious, is that, you know, best number for the exact product that happens to fit well, or is that a number that you think maybe, I don't know, half of your customers can achieve.

We do that today. Yeah. So I'll, I'll, let's, let's talk real numbers.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, 3PL typically will charge you like $3, maybe $3.50 for fulfillment, uh, like depending on how many, like average, uh, uh, number of SKUs per order, let's call it 2. Um, and we can get that, like we, we charge you, uh, it's $0.50 per order, $0.10 per pick. So that same order would be 70 cents, and we still make like really good money on that on gross margins because it's mostly robots.

Okay, but but but but but great gross margins off 70 cents are still cents.

Yes.

And the robots you're buying can't be cheap. Robotics is not famous for its low costs.

Yep.

And you do have to have real estate, as you said, you know, closer to your customers, which is higher cost than having it out in the sticks. So what kind of volume do you need to run through one of your smaller, you know, 30,000 square foot centers to make the math pencil out?

Yeah, it's roughly, it's about 10,000 orders per day to when we start getting into some real profits. We can, we've tested it out, we could do about 30,000 orders a day. And just to like, people understand, I know a lot, not a lot of people really understand fulfillment, but just think of robotics in like its simplest terms. Like this is what it was meant to do. Like robotics was supposed to like be a step change in like cost or speed or whatever. It's not supposed to like replicate what a human was doing. So instead of walking the warehouse floor, like we don't have humanoids doing all these things. And so we could bring down the cost just so dramatically. And then the only real way that this stuff really is going to get adopted, it's not because you want robots in your warehouse, because also you have to upkeep them and all that. There's more overhead. You have to completely change the cost curve. And the only way you could do that is if you fully vertically integrate. You have all these facilities. Yeah, you have to purchase them upfront. So I'll give you some real numbers. $1.2 million in upfront CapEx per warehouse.

It's not that much.

It's not that much.

No.

But to be fair, like, we have a very experienced team and a lot of great—

Oh, no, I'm not talking down your investments. I'm just saying, like, I thought there was going to be another zero in that figure.

That's what I wanted.

Yeah.

I think that somebody going, like, say a small business to try to do this, or honestly, even Walmart, they're going to go to a systems integrator. They're going to, they are going to pay at least like probably 4 or 5 times that. So that's our costs, um, because we are the systems integrator. It's all of our software. We work inside of all of these different separate systems and then bringing them together. But that's the actual hard cost for the actual hardware. So you can imagine, like, When you're doing 20,000, 30,000 orders a day. And yeah, even if you are only making $0.50, $0.60, that's a pretty damn good bit when you're operating like 30 days a week, like per warehouse. The payback on that is very, very fast.

No, all that checks out. I wasn't sure about the, the how much volume you could push through a 30,000 square foot facility. But it sounds like if you make, as you said, reasonable profit at $10K and that can scale up to $30K.

Yes.

Well, then the economics look absolutely beautiful and the repayment period for the investment is going to be I'm not going to run the math in my head, but less than a year. I mean, it's going to be pretty quick.

It's faster than that. Yeah.

Yeah, faster than that. Yeah. I was trying to be— trying to put a loose cap on that.

Yeah, no, that's a good number.

Yeah. So I'm confused about one part, though. Now, I don't think we should have humans walking 47 miles in an Amazon warehouse putting toothbrushes into little carts. I think that's pretty silly. But I'm not sure about why labour costs don't scale linearly with Essentially volume. You would— on your site, you guys talk about how like labor costs kind of spiral as you grow. And to me, that doesn't make a lot of sense because if you have 10 orders, 1 person, then you do 30 orders, 3 people, it seems kind of like 1, 2, 3. What am I missing in that calculation?

Overhead, as far as management and facilities costs, that's where you just pack on so much cost, but also the complexity gets really hard. Quality typically goes down. And so that's why you don't see a lot of like a single 3PL really owning everything. Amazon's a great example, but that's because they do their own products, right? Like that's different. They're not doing it. They're not competing in the open marketplaces with all of these other fulfillment providers. So there's a very long tail of like billion-dollar 3PLs out there. And that's because it's just really hard to scale it. You can't scale it linearly. Like I was in the, Like, not only did I ship, uh, arguably that was a 3PL. We actually did our own labor and all that. But it's like, I saw this at our house all the time. We worked with dozens of different 3PLs and they'd all have the same problem. It's like the management of people, it just breaks. Every single one of these warehouses break and it comes down to the human element. And that's because they just don't have enough leverage. It's like you still have to get more and more people and it's usually a lot of temp labor. And also you're, you're typically have to locate These, like, to get your costs down, you got to get your labor costs down, which means you're in a location that it's probably in the middle of nowhere. Um, like, so, and you probably are competing with other warehousing jobs. It's just really tough. So it's like, it takes a bad supervisor, a bad GM. It takes a misalignment in management. And then all of a sudden everything comes crumbling down. And that's why, like, fulfillment is like one of the only things that As you scale, it actually gets more expensive on a per-unit cost.

That's crazy. But I— and I'm glad you told me that because I never would've guessed that.

Right.

So it really makes the idea of having your smaller facilities with automation make a lot of sense because you don't have the same problem. And also you can be closer to customers for faster ship times. So it's kind of like, it feels kind of win-win-win in that case.

Win-win-win.

If you are an existing 3PL who are going to get the rug ripped out from underneath them. But short of that, right?

Yeah. Well, it's look, it's we're we're in a competitive marketplace, and I think ultimately, like who who is who are the people that are going to benefit? It's going to be consumers and brands, right? Like yeah, like we're all competing. We all want our stuff faster and and cheaper. And like I I'd love for more of my favorite brands to be like have same day delivery and everything, and they can't afford it.

Yes. Which brings me to a question. So we talked, you know, getting the cost of picking storage and, you know, getting something ready to go out of a warehouse, super key, get that down. Lovely.

Yes.

Now on the shipping side of this, right, I presume that you plug into existing delivery services?

Yes.

Yeah.

So we will use today's standard carriers. So the UPSs, the, the whoever, international carriers, DHL, whoever, they'll come to our warehouses today. It's very simple. We're not trying to invent everything. But yeah, that's what it is today.

I was just curious if there's going to be any possibility to work with some of the drone delivery companies. We've talked to Zipline here on the show. I feel like they've kind of proven early scale. There's also a company called Manna from Ireland that we had on the show. They're moving into the US. And so it seems that when we think about low-cost, local, quick deliveries, drones are becoming less of a pipe dream and more of a possibility.

I think so. I, and absolutely, like for us, we will use whatever is cheapest and fastest and high quality. So we're into partnering. Um, potentially we'll, we'll look at maybe even like doing some of it for, for our actual like delivery. Like the fulfillment is really our wedge into like the broader ecosystem. Um, and wherever we can trim costs and pass those savings to our customers, we're going to. The highest cost of an actual like ecommerce transaction outside of the marketing and the product, it is shipping and fulfillment. Shipping is actually more expensive than fulfillment. So we're taking off the fulfillment piece, which really is just like an extra tax. Like, why wouldn't you as a brand just want an extra 2 to 5% gross margins just in your— like, it's like a no-brainer.

Extra 5% gross margins could revolutionize someone's business from breakeven to consistently profitable.

People don't really even believe what we're selling. It's like, No, it's real. We're alive.

I mean, I mean, like, I've known you for a minute.

Yes.

I know you're a real legitimate entrepreneur.

Yes.

I still kind of want to go see one of your facilities and be like, really? 80%? Oh, well, actually, that's a great segue because according to some news I read about your funding announcement, yes, you have facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. You're building one in Dallas and you have a third. Where's the other one?

Chicago. Chicago.

Chicago.

Right.

Yep. So why those 2 locations? How did setup go? And how much volume are you currently handling as your company kind of leaves stealth and goes to market?

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So we started off in the Bay, um, and really because that's where myself and the founding, my co-founder and the team live. And also great place to start a venture-backed company. And our first facility was our R&D facility. And that's where we just tried to make the— like, I knew this company is going to be a really important one if we get the cost down. Yeah, I was as skeptical as you were. I, but I needed to see it and I needed to prove it. And so we did that at a very small scale. So the actual facility is It's about a 10th of the size of our, um, the ones that we're, we're now expanding out. So it's about 2,000. Yeah. 2,000, 3,000. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With the exact same technology, um, that, that we are, are using for our, our rollout. We proved it. Um, and just with, with us and internal, we actually had our own brand that we just were just selling a bunch of stuff on. Um, and, uh, it worked great. Um, and we were doing all the fulfillment, like we were, we were managing the, the robots and we were debugging stuff and all that. And then we got to the point where I was like, okay, we're ready to start thinking about taking on more capital and then going to expand this and then offer it to the broader market. And that's when it's like, okay, if you are in e-commerce logistics, like there's a few things you need to have a central operations because you need to, your first location needs to be central. So Chicago, Dallas, somewhere in the middle of the country. So you're able to reach the coast in a relatively like short amount of time. So that's why we launched Chicago first. And then it's going to be about the coast. So we're getting ready to launch LA. New Jersey is going to be at the end of the year. And then it'll be about kind of just expanding this to every other major market, getting closer to the customers, and then spreading a brand's inventory across our different locations.

These facilities that we're talking about that you're going to bring on this year, are those the I think you said like, like, you know, 30,000 square feet. Yes. You know, up to 10,000 to 30,000 packages a day. Okay. So they're the full zoot.

The full zoot.

Uh, okay. Yes. Okay. Awesome. So how are you getting brands to sign up with you? Because the 3PL market is quite large. Uh, you're competing to some degree to Amazon and their fulfillment network. Yeah. I presume it's not that easy to get a lot of folks to show up. At the same time, you do have a lot of history here.

Yes.

You probably know a lot of people. So how goes the, uh, getting brands to pick you side of things?

So I think that, What gets everybody's attention is the robotics, obviously. And that's kind of like, uh, hey, we're automating this. And everybody's like, yeah, that makes sense. It's like, of course. Okay, we'll take a call or whatever. And where we get people to actually sign on is the cost. It really is. It is such a no-brainer after you trust us. That's the biggest hurdle we had to overcome early days, uh, when we were, um, nothing and just like, uh, we did hire R&D facility, but now we have real customers and all that. But it really, like, I've been in this industry for a long time. Like, Air House was arguably solving the same problem. Our, like, close rates are unbelievable. And also the other important thing, I know we talked a lot about small business, but our ability to go upmarket is unlike anything I've ever seen before. So the exact product is the same for, like, a $50 to $100 million brand.

I was thinking about this when you said you built your test facility. with a couple thousand square feet and the same system. To me, that implies a lot of modularity. Yes, you can scale it up and down so that I don't see a reason why— I mean, correct me if I'm wrong— you couldn't go from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 square feet and just have more of the machines in there. Like, yeah, robots, they don't smell bad. You don't get mad about being packed in, right?

Well, we'll actually— so the benefit of having a more modular, smaller footprint is that you can be located in city centers. So one of the things we actually didn't talk about is like the real estate. How do you— like, where do you get these facilities? And like, we don't need to be in the middle of nowhere. Like, we don't need to be from a cost standpoint. We don't have the per unit costs that a labor-heavy 3PL would be. So it makes sense for us to be close to the city. So, and that lends itself to being in smaller facilities. You're not going to get 300,000 square feet in the middle of San Francisco or something. I mean, I guess you could, but it But then you'd have no money. Exactly. Yeah, totally. And so the smaller nature, it de-risks a lot of things. So you prove out one and then you replicate them. And then you're able to have this like containerized unit that it is more on the small side.

Sure.

But you don't get a lot of the economies of scale by just expanding it. You actually get more benefit to go in more places because then, then you're not only like changing the fulfillment, um, curve on the cost, but you're now moving the shipping needle. And that's how we're able to go upmarket. It's like a brand that is a $100 million brand, they should probably be in, I don't know, 4 or 5 different locations across the US, and they'll see substantial savings on the shipping side. And so for us, being able to be in so many different markets is actually better than having fewer larger facilities.

Which is the inverse of how things had been going, which was enormous Distribution facilities that serve many, many markets. I mean, if you've been on the highway and you've driven past an enormous building with like 50 18-wheelers out there, that's what we're talking about. Okay, so you guys only raised, I think it's $13.5 million. And I say only, that's a very large seed round and well done. Thank you.

Thank you.

10 points. Sorry, I didn't mean that. I was so dismissive. Don't delete what I said before, but here's another take at that. You just raised $13.5 million. Congratulations, Kevin.

Thank you.

No, but I mean, clearly very large aspirations here. And I think there's actually some pretty cool things you could do. I was just frantically Googling, trying to remember the name of the company. Serve Robotics. They have the little delivery bots that go on your sidewalk. They're public and they're only worth $450 million. Yeah. Which is like for the public markets, like a plugged nickel and a piece of gum.

Right.

And like, think about how cool it would be if your facilities in these urban areas had their own dedicated fleet. And so you could tell people like, look, Not only will we cut all your fulfillment costs, but we also have, if your delivery is nearby, we can just do it for you too. Mm-hmm. Like there's so much you can add here. There's even assets in market that are relatively cheap. So are, are you guys gonna be, I don't, I know this is kind of a silly question, but yes, super aggressive in, in trying to like capture market share quickly? 'Cause I don't want anyone else to like come behind you. So my question is, how aggressive are you guys going to be? Because I could see a lot of, uh, inorganic growth opportunities ahead for Satronic.

So for us and how we've even gotten here is focus. Like, we're not good. Like, I, we turn down customers all the time when they want to do a lot of B2B stuff. They wanted to do some custom like packaging or inserts or anything like that. We just say no. We're like, when you're ready to really want, you want cheap and fast fulfillment operations, you come see us. And so the answer is we have to stay focused. And I think that is the only way that, that, that, that's going to be the start of like where you see robotics companies. actually chip off at the incumbents are these very focused use cases. But one other thing is that I think that the broader, like you bring up the different point solutions, which we use them, we love them. It's amazing. It's amazing that venture kind of is backing this industry. But as an actual like business, and even maybe as an investment, these point solutions are really tough because there's a lot of competition. There's not really a lot of defensibility. So like, My broader thesis on the market is that there is going to be a service layer on top of a lot of these different point solutions, whether that's in logistics or something like that. And the people that are able to roll up a lot of these technologies and continue to use the cheapest, fastest, whatever it is, whether they manufacture it themselves or they, they go and partner, that is where all the value is going to increase too, is those, those service levels versus the actual point solutions, the individual robotic Arm piece, whatever. I just believe that it's gonna mostly get commoditized, which I think for a lot of industries is going to be a great thing because it's going to enable a lot of stuff.

Yeah, but fundamentally what you're doing is making e-commerce even better, which I think means that if you own a mall, this is the last chopper out. Drop that asset because we're not going back. Kevin, an absolute treat. The website is citronic.ai. C Y T R O N I C dot A I. And is there a job you're hiring for you'd love to shout out to our audience?

Everything. Yeah, you want to be in tech and you want to be a part of something really awesome, and yeah, hit me up. I'm Kevin Gibbon also on Twitter.

All right, thank you very much. We'll see you soon. As you may have noticed, if you've ever seen this show in video format, I'm a glasses wearer. I've worn glasses since 3rd grade. I've had glasses of all types— fancy sunglasses, very basic regular glasses. You name it, I've worn them. I even had sports goggles back in my high school wrestling days. A little out of fashion now, but they were a real thing. Now, I learned about a company called EyeBot, and what they are doing is putting kiosks into places around the world where you can go walk up and get a new glasses prescription in 90 seconds. I love this idea. I love the idea of bringing healthcare to the people, getting people what they need at a lower price point, applying technology to longstanding issues to make them just easier to solve. So please join me in welcoming Mattias Hoffmann, CEO and co-founder of Eyebot, to the show to tell us all about how he's going to make everyone see that much better. Matthias, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

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I'm very glad to have you here because I do feel like around the world, getting the correct prescription for your eyes is much harder than it should be. And I kind of think of Eyebot as a company that could help a lot more folks have more accurate and regular prescriptions. But, uh, let's talk about the technology first. Most people listen to this, I think, when they get their eyes checked, they go in to see probably an ophthalmologist and they have a big workup like I was describing in the intro. Uh, you guys are offering something a little bit simpler and a little bit more targeted. So why don't you explain to us how it works?

Yeah, so EyeBot is a vision testing technology. It's really in the format of a kiosk that anyone can walk up to and, uh, you go through a battery of tests. The whole thing only takes about 90 seconds. And then, within that time, after you do the test, you punch in your name, information, email, and then all that information that gets packaged goes to the cloud and gets paired with one of our tele-doctors who then review that session and then write a script to your eyes. So, you can essentially get an eyeglass prescription within minutes. So, no planning, no scheduling, you just walk up.

Well, one, that's fantastic. A lot of people just need to get their eyes checked once every couple of years. They're not myself and maybe you who need a little bit more. But, I think we're kind of talking about the difference between an eye exam and a vision test. And, I think that for most people, those are quite literally the same thing. So, can you break down what you're offering and how it might be different from people who are accustomed to getting their eyes dilated once a year?

Right, exactly. Yeah. So, the comprehensive eye exam is really a battery of tests. So, it's quite a big bundle of tests actually if you want to call it that.

Sure.

And, the first portion of a comprehensive eye exam when you go to an eye doctor or an optometrist is the vision testing portion. So, you sort of put your head into a machine maybe, look at a balloon, maybe it's a flippy lens machine that you look at and look at some letters. And, there's a couple more things, but really that's all to test the clarity of your vision. And, from there, the doctor can then tailor a prescription to you so that when you wear a pair of glasses or contact lenses, you see better, right? That's the whole point. And, as a human species, we figured that out. This is a really solved problem. Now, there's a second portion actually of the comprehensive eye exam and that is checking your eye health. So, that's when you kind of do the puff test and maybe sometimes you dilate your eyes. Nowadays, actually, that's kind of falling out of favor, but— kind of dilating your eyes and you actually see the back of the eye. So, you see the retina.

Yup.

And, there's many more tests that you do to check the health of the eye. And so, like I said, the comprehensive eye exam, which EyeBot encourages anyone to do that on a very frequent basis, is important. It's really essential to maintaining our health. So, the eye is essentially the The window to our health. It's actually one of the few spots or only spots where you can directly see your blood vessels without actually having to cut yourself. And so you can diagnose diabetes actually through a comprehensive eye exam, believe it or not. So there's many things that can be diagnosed through that.

So eyes are not the window to the soul. They're the window to watching our blood pump around.

Got it. Yeah, exactly. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity beyond just being able to get to a prescription. There's many more things that can be diagnosed, including cancers, certain kinds of cancers or neurological issues. And, that's essentially what you get out of a comprehensive eye exam. You get a full battery of things. And, what we identified, and I think that resonates in general when I talk to people about this, is that getting an eyeglass prescription just to get a new pair of glasses is unbelievably hard and frustrating for people.

Yes.

It's a multi-week, multi-month process sometimes for people. Now, in many cases, people should get that comprehensive eye exam. But if you've broken your glasses or you have scratched lenses or you're just unhappy with your current glasses, you may actually not need to go through that whole suite or bundle of tests. Actually, all you need is a pair of new glasses or contact lenses, which for that, you only need an eyeglass prescription. And that's really where EyeBot today comes in. So our technology is very mature and very accurate. And it allows people to get to that eyeglass prescription very quickly. And to the point where it's a matter of minutes where you don't need to do any scheduling or planning. You just essentially our iBot technologies and our units are in eyeglass stores in some of the biggest, most prominent retailers like Walmart and Sam's Club. And so it allows you to just walk in, Take a test, get an eyeglass prescription, and buy a pair of glasses. You should be able to buy a pair of glasses like you buy anything. It should be that easy, right? And that's what we're doing. So, but we're not doing the health portion yet, and that's right.

Okay, well, we'll talk about that in a second. But this makes a lot of sense to me because whenever I now go for my yearly exam, they sit me down in front of an automatic machine. It goes, and then like makes a perfect image for my eyes, and then they just kind of check it, and then I think, well, are we done? And the answer's no, because I need some other stuff. But like, I, I'm amazed at how good that's become. When I feel like when I was a child, they really had to start with all the flippy lenses, you know? And it took a while to actually kind of dial it in. Whereas now they jumped to like 9, the 99th percentile of it. So yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me. What does a person pay to, to use your kiosk? And then also, where do the tele-doctors come into the loop?

Yeah, great question. So the first question is the cost. So it's anywhere between $0 to $25, right? So we want to not only make it unbelievably easy for people to get their eyes checked and to get an eyeglass prescription, but also we want to lower the cost so much that you really have no reason to not do this. And that really unblocking and removing all the hurdles and barriers that people have to getting an essential service. Like getting a new pair of eyeglasses is like getting a new pair of shoes. It's a fundamental thing that we need. And so that's why we're really focused on this low-cost approach. The way we actually solve this is that we have business relationships with the retailer, with the enterprise, so that they have some agency on how much to charge for that prescription. In most cases, our partners actually charge $0 to the customer because it is obviously a benefit that drives people in.

Absolutely.

And so it's sort of this win-win solution that we have great business relationships with the retailers. The retailers get more traffic to get incremental customers and revenue, and the consumer and the patient gets a free prescription. That's amazing. Uh, and we know that's, uh, that drives, uh, people in because, um, I mean, there's many statistics out there, but the lower third, uh, of income level in the United States is half as likely to go see an eye doctor.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, it's a money problem, right? Like, they don't have vision insurance. Half of Americans have vision insurance and the other half just doesn't.

That was me growing up, so I'm intimately aware of this. And also, I read a study That showed the impact of going to a lower income school and giving all the kids eye exams and glasses and what happened to their reading scores. It turns out they couldn't not read, they just couldn't see.

Yeah.

And that, that was one of the most heartbreaking things that I've ever read. Because think about these kids who don't know better and are kind of walking through the world effectively. And I say this as someone who's really not blind, but like, you know, pretty poorly visioned, walking through the world in a daze. And so I'm an enormous fan of the idea of getting the cost down here and baking this into essentially other services to make it more available.

Exactly. iBot is here to really level the playing field. Like, it's the— if you have vision insurance or not, it doesn't really matter, right? Your copay is more than $25. So yeah, it's basically even for everybody in terms of cost, in terms of access. And especially we do really well in rural communities where there's frankly just no doctors around.

Where there's frankly no doctors around. I mean, we talk about food deserts quite a lot in kind of, you know, modern culture, but I think we don't talk enough about specialist droughts or deserts as well. And like ophthalmology is, well, you can make a lot of money doing it in a big city, but I don't think you're gonna set up shop in the sticks, probably.

Yeah, so exactly.

On the business part though, my understanding, and I'm not mad about this, so don't take this the wrong way, but is that when we buy a pair of frames, we're paying, quite a lot of margin to the company in question. And is that margin what allows partner frames companies to essentially subsidize the cost of having the kiosk and the telehealth doctor? Because I can see how that math could work out. I just want to make sure that I'm understanding kind of the model.

Oh yeah, I guess I didn't answer your previous question on the teledoctor. So, uh, yeah, so it's our own teledoctor network, right? So we have our ophthalmologists and we have our optometrists And yeah, they get queued in depending on which state it is. And obviously, they're all licensed in the state that they work in and prescribe in. The data that we collect goes to doctors and they look at the data and we even present the data the same way in a chart, the same way they would actually in their own clinic.

Yeah.

So, the sort of the ramp-up speed and time for doctors to work with iBOT is very quick because they You know, it looks like it's the same kind of layout, uh, and they use their clinical judgment and training and schooling to write and craft eyeglass prescriptions the same way they would with patients in their own clinic.

Yeah.

Um, so that's, that's the, the answer to your previous question.

What's the doctor vibe on this? Because on one hand, I can see if I'm an ophthalmologist, I, I don't maybe want to see my patients less frequently, but also I don't want to be the person who's just helping people adjust their That seems like a misuse of my time. And also, people could also moonlight with you guys, I presume, and add to their overall clinical load. So where do doctors land in terms of viewing you as a helper versus, politely, a competitor?

Yeah, I mean, that's obviously the big question here, and that's something we're— even in terms of making the industry understand about what we're doing, we're here to fill a gap. Right? We're not here to displace doctors. We're not here to, um, to, uh, you know, like take people's jobs or anything like that. In fact, what's happening right now is that, uh, the amount of the, the gap of doctors right now, uh, in terms of patients that need, uh, care is actually growing. So, uh, 10 years ago when I, when I joined this industry, I think it was, um, one optometrist would have to care for about 3,000 to 4,000 patients a year. Today, it's 1 in 5,000 per year. It's almost impossible. And, um, and in 10 years, it's going to be about 8,000, um, 1 in 8,000. So, it's just the amount of, uh, doc— the amount of doctors actually, uh, is decreasing, uh, in the United States.

Is that because ophthalmology is a less attractive specialty for, for doctors leaving medical school when they choose residency, or is that just because Yeah, people are like, why is it going up so fast?

Yeah, there's a, there's a very rapidly decreasing, uh, pipeline into residency programs for ophthalmology, and, uh, and optometry is relatively flat right now. And you could argue on the decline, um, in terms of how many students are going, actually getting, uh, board certified per year. Uh, yeah, it's actually on the decline. So our population is growing, Yeah, our, our need for eyeglasses is actually increasing because our kids are 80% more myopic than they were 20 years ago. Screen reading, exactly, like not enough outdoor time. Um, and so those are gonna— those kids are gonna be adults soon, and, and they're gonna—

They're gonna wear glasses.

Or glasses.

100%.

So yeah, if you're in the glasses, contact lens business, uh, you know, the, the revenue is going up, the demand is going up, but, but the amount of available doctors is actually decreasing. And that's the surprising thing. And so iBOT is here, is simply here to fill the gap. And I think once the community understands that, and we talked to many doctors, they totally understand the need. They see it themselves. Optometrists are oftentimes with their own independent clinic booked out for weeks and months, right? And same is true for ophthalmologists. Ophthalmology is projected to have 20% to 30% fewer ophthalmologists in 10 years. And this is coming from the community. This is not like an independent study. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like a red alert from some of the big trade associations in ophthalmology.

It's kind of incredible how I feel like every medical specialty is just under— my spouse is in medicine, so I have some insight into different specialties, and everyone has the same kind of story that you're telling me now, which is like patient loads going up, number of available providers is flat or heading down. Everyone wants to get into something that's super specialized because it's higher value, blah, blah, blah. No one wants to be— it's American healthcare, man.

Yeah, exactly.

Got some holes in it.

What we're seeing here is that the only way to meet the demand of today and even into the future is that we need to automate healthcare. And by extent, and what we're doing is automating eye care. And there's no other way. The 4-wall clinic with a room full of equipment does not scale to the demand today and the demand to the future. It's impossible.

Especially if you found a place where it is mechanically done, even by the doctors, as we talked about earlier, like similar technology. Okay, so what does a kiosk cost to build? I think we're all familiar with kiosks. Mostly they give us candies or whatever. Yours is a bit more technical. I presume it has a higher kind of BOM. So what does it cost to kind of put one of these into a location?

Yeah, I can't speak to like how our manufacturing costs, but it is a— it is by far the most high-tech kiosk out in the world. That I can say. And, it has gone through 8 generations of R&D over multiple years. It is the state-of-the-art on multiple kinds of technologies actually that you use in the optometry clinic. So, we have a very advanced autorefraction technology. We have a very advanced visual acuity system that compresses The, the letters, when you look inside, everything is 20 feet away visually, and your eyes have to focus at 20 feet. But obviously, the kiosk is not 20 feet long.

No, it looks like it's about 12, 14, 15 inches deep, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and so the distance actually even shifts when you get to the balloon part. We also have a balloon part that's familiar to people. And you look inside and look at the balloon, and it's actually scanning your eyes while you're just standing there casually. So, it's, you know, everything is built from the ground up and developed from the ground up. And, we also have a lensometry technology built in that also scans your existing glasses and extracts all those settings. And so, we can transfer those settings to a new pair of glasses with, of course, adjustments that update your current settings that need to be done so that you have the absolute best settings that you need today.

I ask about the cost of building this because There, you are not an asset-light business. Like, you're not making enterprise software, right? This is a thing you have to go out and put it into the world. So with your, I think it was a $20 million Series A, right, Matthias?

Yes, that's correct.

Yeah. So how far does that get you in terms of being able to put kiosks out into the market? I don't know if you're sharing costs with partners or not, but what I don't know is, is this 100 kiosks or is this 10,000 kiosks? I don't even know the zeros, you know?

Well, one unit makes us a good amount of money, so, but 100, Hundreds of casks, yes.

And how long will it take to build those and get them out into the market? I know that supply chains have had a rough couple of years. I'm not sure if that impacts your production process.

A little bit, but it's actually, in terms of the tariffs, it's not really been too impactful to us. It's not something that keeps me up at night. It's not a top 20 problem.

Oh, wow.

So it's quite down there.

Yeah. And so we can really efficiently make these units now. And we have big orders coming in on containers on ships right now. So we're patiently awaiting, you know, we just got a new place, we got a new staging and research and manufacturing facility in Boston. And we're filling that up with inventory because we have a lot of units to put out there.

So which brings us to partnerships. Now, I know you guys have talked about partnering this January with The Framery and the company behind 1-800-CONTACTS. Who else is in your partner portfolio? And can you work with everybody in the eyeglasses space? Because I don't see a reason why you need to pick one partner over another or have exclusivity.

Yeah, I mean, we want to work with everyone, right? Selling glasses is not our business. We're in here to help do vision testing and getting people to the solution they need. Typically, that's the prescription or contact lenses. And so we're not a retailer. And so we work with retailers and provide our services. That's as simple as I can explain that. Now, the different retailers have different products they sell. Broadly characterize that between the traditional eyeglass retailers where they sell glasses— and you actually asked the question about margin. I'm happy to talk about that too. And the AI glasses, which is a sort of a new nascent industry that's growing now. We're working with all of them. That's what I can share at this point. So from the traditional big logos that, you know, sell glasses or chains and all the way to mid-market and independent stores.

Uh-huh.

And then in the AI glasses, which, you know, you've seen the Meta Ray-Bans and Google, of course, also came up with new versions and some other logos that I can't name are bringing out their own versions. And so all that is happening and it's the new exciting Fast-growing market as well. And Eyebot is here to help unlock that, that bottleneck is the prescription, right? Because if you want to get a new pair of Meta Ray-Bans, or you want to get a new pair of AI glasses, you also need to have a prescription. And people don't walk around with that in their pocket. And so—

No. And also, you're talking about products that retail for a higher unit cost than your average set of frames. Admittedly, the pair that I just bought, this is my backup pair. My kids broke my main pair twice. Shout out toddlers, just lovely people. I want to go get like an Apple Vision Pro, but what I don't want to do is go through this, the ridiculous annoyance of dealing with my prescription, its intensity, da da da. But if like I was a normal person and I wanted to get a pair of those and I wore a normal prescription, I would just go to the Apple Store, stand in front of the iBot kiosk for 90 seconds, have that inputted into my order. Like it just, it feels like this is a thing that should be brought into the physical location of a lot of places. So I really like the approach of this.

Um, so you're gonna see exactly that kind of, uh, business model, uh, in the coming months?

I hope so, because I don't know, man. I'm still staring at monitors like I did when I was, you know, 10. It feels a little archaic. I would like to try something else. Um, how has consumer reaction to this been? Because you and I clearly know— well, you know a lot, I know a little, but we understand the space a little bit and how the technology works to some degree. The average person doesn't. Are they comfortable with this?

Yeah, actually, what's been surprising to us is the kind of uptake that we're seeing in terms of demographics, right? So this is the stuff that gives me goosebumps is like, and this is why I'm— the entire iBot team is, if you ask anyone on our team, like, why are you working on this? It typically revolves around the fact that we have a solution that works for so many different kinds of people. And what I'm saying here is like all ethnic backgrounds, all cultural backgrounds, all skin colors, all like rich or poor, educated, not educated. It doesn't matter. Rural, urban, blue, red. Rural. We see everybody. We see doctors, we see bikers, we see grandmas, we see Amish people, right? We have Amish people getting eyeglass prescriptions from Eyebot. Like, how is that possible, right? But because there is a real strong demand for this kind of service, and the alternative is, of course, waiting weeks. And so that's really what gets us super excited is just the humanity of who's using this. That's one thing. That's one clear sign of something that's working for us. Now, the other thing, of course, that we always track is how happy are people with the glasses? They're using iBot prescriptions. And what we're happy to report, and we have a ton of data on this now, is that not only do we have really high NPS score or customer satisfaction scores and, you know, 80+ scores, we also have extremely low remake rates. Remake rate is, you know, how often do people go back and say, hey, I want this prescription changed, I don't like it.

Yeah.

Yeah, we beat the industry average by a considerable amount. So if you were to compare that to like how good our doctors are, we're in the top 10% of doctors nationwide.

That's fantastic. I want to go back to the this works for everyone thing, and I was going to bring this up dead last, but I'll just bring it up now because I'm legitimately curious what your thinking is on the point of American healthcare being a little bit uneven based on who it reaches and how and the quality of care that they get and what they have access to. Frames can still be relatively expensive, and I feel like what you guys have done as a company in a for-profit sense is great technology, good distribution, and I think it's a great, great product. But for a lot of folks who don't have money or insurance or access to it, getting this prescription isn't going to be the entire process, and you guys can't take that on because that's not your job. But are there any major charitable groups or programs that you could maybe supply a handful of iBot kiosks to to allow them to bring them on the back of a truck or whatever to places where they're needed to give you guys the ability to help more people faster than you might be able to with a more traditional commercial-only rollout.

Yeah, exactly. So we are actually in discussions with multiple organizations, including the WHO. And I mean, there's so much opportunity overseas, right? Like in, in the Philippines or in certain nations in Africa, like there's just Um, there's a lot of folks that need access to care. Uh, the, the statistic that I saw recently is like 1.5 billion humans on this planet right now are not seeing well, and all they need is a pair of glasses. It's crazy, man.

For people who don't have vision problems, they don't understand how, how bad that, that, that can be. Now, not everyone has really bad vision, but like, you can't read signs when you're driving. You can't see the fork you dropped. You can't, see your kids smile when they look at you. Like, this is a real loss. This is— and 1.5 billion people is, uh, what, 22% of the population, whatever?

Yeah, exactly. And the, the funny thing is that as a, as a, as a human race, as a species, you know, intelligent species, we figured out how to solve this problem. It's a curved piece of, of plastic, uh, that makes you then see well. Yeah, but And making them nowadays— and this actually goes back to your original question about margin— this pair of glasses that I have here right now cost $5 to make.

$5?

Yes.

OK. What are the lenses?

Not the highest-end pair, but they work great for me. Now, of course, there are more specialty lenses. And if you're going to go progressives, it costs more. But in general, most pairs of eyeglasses cost less than $20 to make all in. Right? Like sort of the general purpose ones. Then you can get into like specialty coatings and specialty lenses, of course. But really, the coatings don't cost that much money to add. I won't say what margin that is.

Don't tell me how much money I just wasted on my pair that I have coming in soon because—

yeah.

Yeah. So making the product, making this solution, including contact lenses, is actually very economical for the for the manufacturer to do. Um, and but, but then why is it still so hard to get them, right? This should be unbelievably commoditized.

Yes.

Uh, and it's not. And the big bottleneck, that's where we're stuck as a humanity, is, is as, as a species, is like getting to the numbers to getting those, uh, those glasses. And that is the next piece that is getting automated You can't stop it. It's the next piece that's getting automated. It's the next piece that's getting commoditized.

Okay.

And that's, that's where it's heading. So it can't—

Let's be rude. Let's be rude here. Let's just go for it. So I personally, me, with the current state of AI technology, I think that right now it makes good sense to have doctors in the loop reviewing prescriptions in a format that they understand, making sure that it's correct, making tweaks as they need to. Viva. Fast forward 3 years, right? In just another couple trillion data points, will we still need doctors in the loop? Because that will be a rate-limiting step to bring this to 100 million people in the Philippines, Africa, parts of Asia, etc., right?

Yes, 100%. So doctors need to be in the loop. And as it turns out, that in our case, writing great eyeglass prescriptions is— not many people know this, but it is science and also art.

Yeah.

Like, you need a tremendous amount of experience to craft well-tolerated settings. And that's really one of our big benefits is sort of this hybrid solution where we collect all the data electronically, but we still have that experience in the backend from licensed, very experienced tele-doctors. But, also, as far as treating goes and finding solutions, I think that will be human-driven for a long time.

Okay.

The decision-making, the agency, all of that will be doctor-driven, like who takes the responsibility, right? Do we really want a computer program to just make decisions on our care and, and our treatment? And this is actually a broader question in healthcare, right?

It is.

Ultimately, I think that's kind of where the buck stops in terms of AI is like, well, who makes that decision on your treatment and care? And I think it will take a long time for humans to give up that kind of agency. And so, um, yeah, as far as iBot goes, uh, we're going to have, uh, you know, doctors— we have doctors review every session and, and deal with every session the same way it happens in a clinic. And I think there's a common misunderstanding out there about how iBot does it. But, um, yeah, it's the— if we're effectively just kind of reorganizing the care model.

Um, yeah. Collection happens Digitally. Yeah, I just think that for the, the 1.5 billion people who need them, I think they would rather have a 95% solution than a 0% because there's a chance of an issue. So I'm thinking about that versus like in Utah or whatever. But it seems like all we need is you guys to have a huge commercial success so you can donate a couple of units, get someone to make the— what's that Mark Cuban prescription drug company? Cost Plus. Cost Plus for frames and lenses. And then, you know, get some doctors to donate a block of their time every month to review scripts for poor kids around the world. And we could really change the world, but it'll come down to how big iBot can get. So tell me about what's coming up for the company. New partnerships, kiosk upgrades, what's next?

Yeah, we have numerous partnerships, probably more than I can put on my fingers today that we're gonna be announcing. And yeah, so there's just a tremendous amount of pull in the market because You know, there's just simply no doctors available. And we are a very practical drop-in to solve that, that problem. And that goes for the AI glasses companies and also traditional optical.

And just before I let you go, you are building in the Boston area. I'm here in Providence, Rhode Island. It is rare that I get to speak to someone who I could drive to in, you know, less than 3 days. So tell me about building in the Northeast and how the ecosystem is for founders for venture capital, for just, you know, networks of people that are also interested in the same things that you are?

I mean, I'm gonna maybe do some hot takes here. But the— so overall, Boston is a fantastic place for robotics, for hardware engineers. There's been no shortage of talent in the Boston area. And we have a fantastic team. And it's sort of like, once you're in that community, once you're in the hardware community, and I used to work at a company called Formlabs. It's a 3D printer company. That whole network has been, you know, that Boston kind of network has been super valuable for us in finding great talent and knowing people that know people, right? That's kind of how it goes. But as far as venture capital goes, Boston does have some good VC firms. But what I would say, and this is my hot take, is that the mentality and the sort of the vision of East Coast versus West Coast venture capital is very different. So while— what I mean is more that West Coast venture capital is very much dream big, you know, be disruptive, try something radically new. And East Coast is more traditional kind of capital where you need more proof and you need to have a clear business case already sorted out. And so that's kind of the differences. And depending on where you are, what kind of business you're building, one or the other is better. But for something extremely ambitious as iBot, West Coast type VC just is better suited.

Well, I'm an Oregon boy living on the East Coast, so I like it either way. I'm just glad to see companies building outside of like, you know, 8 square blocks in SoMa in San Francisco, a neighborhood that I love, a neighborhood where I used to work. But But it's not the entire world. And I think as we think about all the problems that we need to fix, I think we're going to need to have more centers. So I'm glad you're making your footprint in Boston. Maybe you can teach those VCs how to be a little bit more freewheeling with their checks. But in the meantime, Matthias, what's the website? And is there a role you're looking to hire for you'd love to shout out to the audience?

Yeah, so we're looking for more salespeople. We're looking for more marketing people. We're looking for more R&D engineers. We're looking for more scientists. We're looking for more across the board, right? Certainly. That's, I would say, in that order.

Yeah.

And our website, yeah, it's, it's eyebot.co. So E-Y-E-B-O-T dot C-O.

All right. Well, announce those partnerships and then come back and tell us all about them. But in the meantime, Matthias, thank you so much and go out there and save the world, please.

Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you.