From Zero to 150 Robots in Just 20 Months | Mike LeBlanc, Foundation Future Industries

33:55And that, you know, for us, that was right during the election. And we all said, you know, our robot walks just like the president. You know, we were like, it has a presidential gate because it walks like President Biden. Uh, you know, I think a lot of people had, had that kind of shuffle going, but, you know, as we've moved forward now, you see, you see robots that are running marathons. You see, you know, you see very, very agile robots and we've already started to hit all these uneven surfaces, be able to move through things. You know, we put objects in front of it. It knows which objects to walk around and which ones that can actually plow through.

34:27So no, and this, this is all in 20 months of work. So yeah, I'm, I'm very optimistic about, about what we're able to do on this. Yeah, that's fascinating. And so you talked about the deployment in Georgia, where the robots are are tailored to to the ceiling with electrical cables that feed power to them, so that they can operate 24 seven without people having to swap batteries and stuff. When you're on the battlefield, how do you handle power supply? We're doing that with battery. And this, again, really goes to the use case of how long do you need that robot to be running? So having a robot run 24-7 is what makes it make sense economically in a factory.

35:15If you're going to replace three shifts of workers that are each getting paid$60 ,000, you can make it make economic sense. On the battlefield, they don't need it to be working 24 hours. So they do have lots of loitering drones, and they have more concerns about what their airtime is. But for us, it really is these, you know, they would want to be able to turn on their robot, go pick up the supplies. The truck is here. We can pull those all out. We need to get a better perspective on a certain building or we want to go look at the enemy's flank, send out some reconnaissance robots. So it's going to be much more directed actions, I think.

35:53Yeah. And so your battery, what is the battery like? Right now, four hours, you know, and we're hoping to extend that. And I think that batteries are one of those interesting things that, again, you kind of have all of these different startups, right? A hand, a robotic hand is a company all in itself. A battery is a company all in itself. You kind of have all of these different ones, but batteries are a place that I think that the industry is making a lot of gains. And that makes it easier for us to start picking up and getting much longer times. Yeah. And so the idea would be a team would go out with a couple of these robots or one robot and a whole bunch of battery packs and they just swap the battery packs.

36:38And yeah. Yeah. We've had a lot of, you know, the imagination runs wild when you have a human shaped robot. And so we've had a lot of different decision makers in the military thinking different things. But one that we've heard a lot of is attaching robots to trucks, figuring out some way to have robots kind of tucked up and on the sides of trucks that as they arrive, they can just pop these down and have the robots, you know, first walk a perimeter around to make sure that there are no landmines, no IEDs, anything like that, right? There are all these kind of different use cases that people are coming up with, but a lot of them converge on that.

37:15And, you know, so you'd kind of have the truck as the central place that would have batteries. and we will get to the point that our robots can change each other's batteries. So we'll find this fully autonomous command center. Yeah. I mean, this all sounds very futuristic, sounds possible, but it still sounds like we're not there today. How confident are you that you'll be able to deploy successfully on a battlefield in a certain time frame? And what time frame are you looking at? You know, I think I'm just as confident as I am that my kids are going to be able to drive cars. They're going to get married and buy houses.

38:03And, you know, a lot of this is you look at it in its infancy and it is hard. It's hard. My kids are six, seven and eight years old. it's hard to look at them and start thinking, oh, they're going to do taxes, right? Because they're not there today. But when you really look at how quickly they're growing, and when you really think, you know, when I think back to two years ago, how my kids were talking, how they were acting, how they thought, right? And where they are today. That's where you start to go, yeah, we have this very linear view of what growth and improvement looks like. But for robotics, especially.

38:38I think if you look 20 months ago, we didn't have a robot. We had smiles on our faces and the idea of humanoids, right? And today we have robots already deployed out in the world working full shifts. We have robots that are ready to walk uneven surfaces and go out into the battlefield. So that's all just in 20 months. So I think 20 months from now is going to be shocking to a lot of people. I think all of this is a lot closer than anyone will think. Let's talk about the Georgia deployment. What exactly are the robots doing? So it's almost all injection molded parts. So, you know, all of these other FANUC robots and things all make all of these parts.

39:25They clip them together. They come out on a conveyor belt. and when we arrived there it would be you know a human that's standing there a person on an eight hour shift the the parts come out in different spaces on the conveyor belt right so there was there's a little bit of adaptability that needs gone there they they would put a label on it they would do a quality control check with a with a camera and then after they marked it good they would put it into the packaging if it was bad they would they would move it to a separate rack where it would get taken away. And so, you know, as we looked at that, we thought we could probably handle something like this.

40:01And I think it was what, April to November, never do math in public, but I don't know, six months in or so that we did a proof of concept on this. And we brought our first robot out. That robot was on wheels. When we did it, we didn't have the legs yet. And the robot was able to do all the parts. So we did that for hundreds of parts for all their executive team and they now said this this looks like it's worth moving forward uh and so we now we have a contract for 150 robots going and doing those tasks uh and that's that's what we're we're deploying and we're we're working to to get all those robots out um but they're they're very very similar tasks different parts but very similar yeah what kind of a factory i mean what's the product that they're assembling it's a it's an automotive oem so it's they they make parts for you know they they actually they make a part for my uh uh land rover you know so it's funny as you go out there it's a little plastic cladding part on the outside of the door and i go yeah you can pop it off and see that's made in that's made in georgia and the power uh presumably was that difficult to design the the cabling so that these robots don't get tangled up not at all oddly enough.

41:18You know, I thought that was going to be a real thing. It was the thing that we talked about a lot before we went out there. But really, so all 150 of these operate in a 15 by 15 cell or smaller, 15 foot by 15 foot. There's nobody that moves that much. And the first robots that we've deployed, they really only take a couple steps. You know, at most, they're probably taking five steps. And, and so it's interesting. We have, we'll have the robot move, uh, just move backward instead of, uh, instead of like turning, turning around and doing these things. And so the cable really just hangs there and can, you know, it's, it's like, um, like, uh, you know, my dog, when I put them on a, on a running leash out there, it just doesn't get tangled.

42:00Yeah. Uh, yeah, that's interesting uh the dog analogy the uh uh where do you so you guys are 20 months in i mean it's incredible um and maybe it's it's the fearlessness that comes with someone coming in fresh i don't know because a lot of the researchers that i've talked to are so cautious about capabilities you know uh and frankly what i've seen until fairly recently with uh optimists or They don't blow me away and they don't look very robust. But, you know, you guys have, you know, made all this progress in 20 months. Where do you see this going for you and for the industry? You know, to me, this really is one of those cases where the attitude and approach makes a huge difference in how the technology develops.

43:15And, you know, I think everybody saw there was a viral video. I think it was out of Germany or Russia. I can't remember where it was out of, but the robot that walked on stage and fell. And, yeah, and the guys run out to cover it like a car accident and they're very frantic about it. It is not hard to find videos of our robot falling. But what you'll see when it falls, you know, is Sanket and I will be standing next to it. It will fall. And we continue conducting the interview as we lift it back up and get the robot working. Because I think that we coming into this, you know, we're not shy about saying this is very new technology.

43:53All of the stuff that we're solving, you know, we're very, very honest about where it's at. but as you do that throughout the whole team and you don't have these kind of marketing lies that are built up and things that you're hiding behind and trying to make these highly curated videos, you have a team that is actually able to deal with the problem that's happening. And when you have very smart people that are directed toward those problems, you can get those problems solved. So I do think this is an interesting time where the experts in all of the specific tasks have kind of too much project fatigue for them to really see how quickly this is going to move.

44:30And so I'm still shocked. I'll talk to other founders and they'll be saying, yeah, I think we're 10 to 15 years out. And I go, you better get ready because we're making 10 ,000 this year and I'm not going to keep those in a storage unit. These things are getting out in the world. Yeah, and that's, I think I told you, I wrote something last year, early last year, about a year ago about humanoids and how the promise is way out ahead of the reality. And there are all these problems with power supply and the strength of actuators and the generalization of the models that control them. Particularly, there was talk, and there continues to be, of household robots that will be your housekeeper.

45:29And I have been very, not skeptical that it won't happen someday, but that we're even within 10 or 15 years of that, that it's going to take a long time to get that level. this is this is so funny because i have you know from from your alma mater well i call it the new york times i have hanging on my wall the new york times you can print any old copy of the newspaper any page right and so i went through the archives and found in i think it's 1906 i think it's october 1906 there is an article that says why there will never be heavier than air flight and it says so many people have been trying planes and and the the analogy that it uses this is the math that it does it says uh you know if you look at how long it took birds to evolve right you would already have you would already have almost a million years and to do that with metal which is even heavier is going to be even harder and so the the writer says that it's going to be between 1 million and 10 million years for human beings to to a deep flight and three months later you had the Wright brothers that were first in flight.

46:38And so I have that hanging, I have that framed on my wall, because I think that we are living in exactly that time where the humanoids are in their infancy. I think that a lot of people working on them don't believe in them. I think a lot of them still think, yeah, there's funding coming in, but these things aren't going to turn out. But as I look at this, we are the Wright brothers. These are going to be working far sooner than anybody thinks. And people are going to be shocked at the change that it makes in the world. Hyundai is famously, as they were featured on 60 Minutes, using or at least talking about deploying Boston Atlas, Boston Dynamics, Humanoid.

47:20And Boston Dynamics is tied up with DeepMind, Google DeepMind, who would be terrifying to me to have to compete with them. I mean, first of all, with Boston Dynamics, because they've been at this for such a long time, and the criticism of their robots used to be, yeah, but it's all teleoperated. There's no AI controlling the robot. But now they've got DeepMind, and they've got a refined form factor. I mean, it's pretty impressive. Doing in the video I saw doing something similar to what you're talking about in Georgia, picking up parts, scanning it for defects and then moving it to where it needs to be.

48:07How do you see the competitive landscape? Is this a market that is going to be so large that there will be many players or do you feel pressure from people like Boston Dynamics and Deep Brain? Oh, we feel a lot of pressure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is and that's that's why we work, you know, six, six days. Some of our teams work six days a week. Some some teams work seven days a week because this this is a huge race against all of these. but you know when i when i look at boston dynamics i loved watching that 60 minutes i watched it with my kids getting ready the other day the other morning uh they are doing almost exactly the same task so if you look at what the parts they're using i mean they look almost identical to what they're doing some nuances in the video are they're doing it in a replica site to the side of the factory they're not doing it on the manufacturing line they're not running anything close to to 24 hours and uh as you actually watch the tasks that they're doing they're moving a lot of things from racks to tables, which is a capabilities demonstration, but it's not the actual task.

49:15I'm sure that's not, nobody needs parts taken from a rack and put on a table. And so when I look at that and I think about how long Boston Dynamics has been around and in space, and when I look at us and what we're doing today and how long we've been in space, I don't feel that worried. So you can throw in lots of, you know, Google DeepMind. I mean, going against Elon, what's more scary than going against Elon, right? But as I look at those, I think a lot of people are making these design choices that are going to be much more lightweight. They're going to be hoping to get into the home. And the ones that are focused on business like us, I don't see anybody that's moving anywhere as close to as fast as we are.

49:55So we'll see how many winners there end up being in all these spaces. But as of right now, I think as long as we keep pushing on this as hard as we have been, we've got momentum and we're going to see these things really fly. Yeah. And do you think that then there's room for many players like there will be someone specialized in military grade robots? There will be some that specialize in, you know, household robots? Or do you think there will be kind of an iPhone of robots that can be applied or tweaked? Yeah, I think it's going to look a lot more like cars. Right. And that's why we've been really focused.

50:36We always say we're building the pickup truck. Everybody else is building the Prius. I think that you are going to have to have these lightweight, low bomb cost consumer robots. If you really want to get it out there to lots of homes, it just doesn't make economic sense to make it very expensive. So you really need to hit even the$20 ,000,$30 ,000 that Elon's talked about. that's still pretty expensive for what these robots are going to do. For us working in businesses, when you're working on ports, when you're replacing specialized jobs that, you know, I just looked at Ford is having trouble filling all of these positions for$180 ,000 a year.

51:17When you're facing those kinds of things, you can make a much more robust robot. And so I don't see that landscape changing anytime soon. And I think there probably will be different models that are doing those things. And so there's room for for many companies. Once it's solved, it's sort of an endless market. Right. Yeah, I think I think is as varied as the cars you see on a road. Right. So you see you'll see a cycle. Right. There's going to be somebody with a tiny unit tree. You know, those things are like three feet tall, but they'll have that for crawling in attics. I don't know what they're going to have them for.

51:54But you'll see that all the way up to, you know, very heavy and much larger robots that are able to lift a lot more. And who knows how big and robust those can get. Yeah. And, you know, you don't have to talk about this, but you're new and you're venture funded. I guess you have a little bit of revenue coming in, but how long, what's your window? So, I mean, at a certain point, a lot of these companies are going to run out of venture funding and, you know, get gobbled up, I guess, by people like Boston Dynamics or Optimus. Yeah, no, the thought of being bought by Boston Dynamics is absurd to me.

52:43But, you know, we might buy them. You never know. They've got some good stuff. I really threw it into something. We've got very robust funding. And the interesting thing is, this is not a hard thing for investors to see and to see the power of. I think if you look across human history, we've really been subsidized by slavery for almost all of it. When we finally finished slavery, it was with the help of the Industrial Revolution. And so robots were actually able to help us stop that. But then we just started new slavery under the name of globalization, and we just shipped it off to China. them.

53:20And so, you know, I, again, I was a classic philosophy major. Aristotle says the only way that you'll ever truly get rid of slavery is with automatons, with things that are able to do their own tasks. And I think that is the age that we're living in. And so when you're dealing with such an existential question, everyone just understands that in their bones. And so as you can show them, you know, this is a very visual product as they see what we're able to do autonomously. When people come, we bring investors to the factory to actually look at these robots. And it's not that glamorous, right? They're not that fast.

53:53They're moving within the same time that a person does. It's 60 seconds per part that they have on these. Some of the work cells are 52 seconds, but they're all right around there. As they see it doing that, and they talk to our customers and they go, you actually sent three people home because of this, right? You're actually recognizing ROI. I think that is more surprising to them than seeing a machine that's able to walk like a human. The fact that we're actually employ robots to save money. So I think there's always lots more funding when you can, when you're saving customers money, you, you have very, a lot of power to go scale.

54:30And when you have a lot of power to scale, you have a lot of power to raise capital. Yeah. And I hate this question, but I, I feel compelled to ask because it's such a part of the discussion these days because I'm a tech optimist and I think that the labor market will figure itself out. But just that, being able to replace workers with humanoid robots, does that concern you or how do you see that play? No, not in the least. I really, I look at these tasks and you'll watch these people. I'll sit up, they have little ladders that you can climb up and I'll sit there and I'll watch them for hours.

55:11I'll be looking across the factory and I'll be watching these people pick up a piece of plastic, hold it under camera, put on a label, put it in packaging. And I think all of these humans have stolen robot jobs. These were all stolen from robots and we're taking them back. I think that is nobody wants to go to work. We hang with all these people. My, you know, my wife will come on site. She brings all these fancy Starbucks drinks for everybody. And we walk around and we talk, talk with everybody in there. I don't know anybody in the plants that we're operating in that is upset that the robot has taken job.

55:44It's just the same as a FANUC robot coming in and doing something. Our most frequently asked question, I always say, is, can I take a selfie with it? People love to come up. They love to say we're working with humanoids. And I think that overall, the best example is really ATMs. right? When the ATM came out, people said, it's going to put bank tellers out of business. But sure enough, it actually just meant that we expanded the number of banks to the point that we have more bank tellers today than we ever did before the ATM. So, you know, with any technology right now, we're replacing a lot of jobs.

56:20But then I think very quickly, people see that they can expand because they have this technology. So they go, we can start a new plant. And then people start realizing they can do fully new tasks because they have this new capability. And so, you know, where all of that goes, I'm very optimistic about how many jobs that's going to create, how many human beings still need to be involved in those processes, and how cool the work is that they're going to be doing because it's very fun working with robots. Yeah, yeah. And you were saying at your offices you have robots roaming around. Are these prototypes or is that part of the testing?

56:57No, yeah. So these are all, you know, if you walk in, you'll just see a lot of engineers focused on their computers and looking over at the robot. Right. And God knows what they're looking at and what they're looking for. But that that is the job is really we run them on these replica sites. We build exactly replica sites of our of our customers work sales. We do those both in our German German office and in our San Francisco office. and but these these robots are always walking around doing some kind of testing uh sometimes you know we had to have we had a customer that wanted to see how long the robot could stand they wanted to make sure that it could just stand there for 24 hours without moving and having to catch itself so there was one day that we were just videotaping that uh there are other days that for hours the robots uh we just test how they do just walking back and forth just a walk and a turn just a runway walk and we'll we'll run that for hours just to see see how it all goes so it's i always say it's like willy wonka for adults it it has this just really cool feel when you walk in there of and and you feel optimistic when you walk in there about what the future is going to look like yeah yeah and do you think that you're uh on par with the other players do you think you're ahead of them is from you've said you're you're deploying more quickly uh or do you think there are others that are ahead of you.

58:20I mean, I don't want you to rank your competitors, but who do you watch and not necessarily worry about, but who do you see is on the right track? I think Figure and Optimus look really good. You know, I think the reason that we've been able to deploy more and on full contracts, not on pilots and these little tests, that really comes down more to solving the whole problem. You know, and I see this, this is in startups. I see this all the time that they kind of go in and they handle just some base case, but they can't make an economic case. There was a robot a couple of years ago that was dipping fries into a deep fryer and taking them out.

59:06And they were saying, we're going to replace the fry cook, but they couldn't open the bag of fries, right? That to me is, that just encapsulates everything that people do wrong. in their go-to-market strategy. And so it's interesting, when you go back and look at Edison, the most important part, I think, of what Edison did, there were already light bulbs around, right? He didn't, and electricity has always been around. He didn't invent electricity, right? But he realized you needed to have a power plant and he realized you're gonna need to do that for all of the homes around. And so he solved the whole product.

59:36He was able to put it out there and then made the innovations to make it cheap enough that it was worth people getting. It's those kind of human and economic conditions that you really need to satisfy. And that's why I think that we've figured out a way to get these robots into action a lot sooner than anybody else has by really just looking at the whole product, putting ourselves in the customer's shoes and saying, what am I paying today? How robust does this robot need to be for me to really trust that this robot can do my part? And that's been the real innovation that we've figured out to get these robots out faster.

1:00:12And what is the pricing? Do you have a target price point? I mean, regardless of, obviously, it's, you know, you can't, you know, optimize cost when you're starting up, but you were saying 10 ,000. What did you say? How many robots this year? these are yeah we'll make 10 000 robots this year yeah um so right now we're we're only working with six customers we're keeping it very tight uh and that's that's because we have a hundred robot minimum at any customer so the the contract size we're working with are you know the the largest contract that we're working with is 2 000 robots but they all kind of need to be in that range um and yeah and for for these robots for the initial users it's all 100 000 per year per robot But it will go up from there as they become more robust, as they're able to take over harder jobs.

1:01:08The prices will go up. But for all of these initial customers, we have the same deal,$100 ,000 per robot per year. And that's are you essentially renting the robot or are they buying them? Yeah. Full lease that includes all, you know, us coming and fixing them. If they go down, it has all over the air software updates. It's it even has if the robot goes down, we have built into our service level agreement that a human being on our side has to come and do the task while the robot is down. So there are all kinds of contingencies about how this has built up. And a lot of those we took the same structure from from Cobalt, my last company, where where we did have, you know, hundreds of hundreds of these robots out there and had to really learn how how do you fix a robot when it goes down in Singapore?

1:01:52Yeah. Yeah. Although I don't think you're going to be sending employees out to the battlefield to stand in for an open robot. Yeah. Is that the same? Is the cost higher for the military grade? For the military, we've been working different pricing in different use cases, and they have their budgets work differently. it's very hard for them to go on a subscription. So we're doing some outright buys and then they have some maintenance that they're able to buy on top of it. But yeah, we're still evolving what those contracts are going to look like. Yeah, and you have contacts in the military having come from the Marines, but how did you penetrate that incredibly complex bureaucracy?

1:02:42I've spoken to a lot of startups that have products that are relevant for the military, but they don't want to touch it because it's such a time suck trying to get through. I think, did you say that you have a relationship with Anderil? Well, so Anderil, we've had, you know, Palmer Luckey has spoken through our robot several times. So we actually dress it up in a Hawaiian shirt and the shorts and a mullet wig. So it's been very cool to see, yeah, to see him talking through the robot and we'll continue to do that uh whenever whenever he can't make an event a robot will be there uh but no really really breaking into all these things i i think that the military gets a bad rap for for its ability to purchase things uh i you know i've sold i've sold to amazon general motors you know uber doordash salesforce you know a lot of a lot of big names city bank you know at kobold they're all hard to break into yeah it's it's hard to sell things to a business.

1:03:43And the reason, you know, there is a lot of red tape in a lot of these places. But the real problem is there aren't just full decision makers that can just simply say that's going there and nobody's going to say anything about it. It's every decision that they make is political. And so you have to build coalitions. You have to, you know, you have to get a large tent if you want to put these things out there. And I think the military is largely the same. So we've talked a lot with Congress about this. We've talked a lot with generals roles about this. We've talked a lot with just soldiers on the line.

1:04:16And you really have to work all those different angles, just as going into a big enterprise deal. You have to talk with the workers, you have to talk to their supervisors, you have to talk to the CEO and the private equity company that owns them. You've really got to understand all those different aspects. And so I think it's largely the same for us going into the military. And which service are you working with? So we have contracts with the Army, Navy, and Air Force. And then we're just beginning with the Marine Corps. And we hope to begin with the Department of Homeland Security this year. Yeah.

1:04:50And the point to get into those, do you approach each or are you going through the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center? We go talking to everybody. And this is, you know, for, for me, I, of course have everybody in my peer group is a lieutenant colonel. So I know a lot of battalion commanders. Uh, so there's just a large group of those in my phone that I can, can call at all these times. Uh, but there, there are also a lot of, a lot of generals that, uh, that I know through Harvard, a lot of Marine generals go through Harvard. Uh, so, so I know them there, there are just a lot of contacts that pop up and, you know, we, we were able to go to the white house, uh, last year.

1:05:28Um, we've, you know, we've, we've been in contact at the highest levels of government talking about this. And so I think a lot of it is putting it on number one's radar, getting a lot of people comfortable with us and with what we're doing. And we'll start to see some very big contracts come out of that. Yeah. Well, you're a very good communicator.

1:05:54I have to say, though, I remain cautious. well you're gonna have to have me back on Craig we'll check back in in 12 months and I'm gonna go Craig we're sitting here on January 8th 2026 and it didn't seem like it was gonna happen we have 10 ,000 robots out today yeah yeah absolutely we'll see where we're at