Brian Walker, Founder at Revel

0:00Brian, welcome. Thank you for joining me. Episode one of Scaling Europe. How are you doing? Pretty good, man. How are you? Pretty good. Before we kick off, why don't you just give me a quick introduction to who you are and what you're building?

0:11Brian Walker:Brian, Brian Walker, founder of Revel. We're building a data library for embodied AI, so physical AI. So the best way to kind of think of it is like, you think, scale AI for physical AI. Our main mission right now is to partner with real-world product manufacturers that you find in factories or your house. You know, tool manufacturers, like DeWalt, Milwaukee, Makita, or Dyson, Miele, or any kind of appliances. And we go and partner with these manufacturers. We take their manufacturing schematics, files, and create digital twins of their products. And then we offer it on the other side of our platform.

0:59Brian Walker:We offer it to the robotics companies like Figure Optimus, Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics to train up in simulation. So we're kind of the layer between the robotics manufacturers and the real world products. As you know, the LLMs had all of these tokens to scrape from the Internet and a bunch of other different places. Robotics don't have that. And so we are trying to accelerate the advent of sort of physical AI by helping provide some valuable data. So you're building digital versions, digital twins of real products in a digital environment to create a database that you can then give, like you said, robotics companies.

1:47Yeah.

1:48Brian Walker:So is that right? Yeah. So basically, let's just take like Figure, for example. So Figure provides a digital twin of their humanoid. We're primarily focusing on humanoids. We think that's going to be the biggest product of the future. And NVIDIA just announced a partnership with Foxconn, and they're going to start building their in-house humanoids. So it will be interesting to see their version. But if you take a figure as a humanoid, they will provide on one side of the platform the digital twin of the robot. And then the other side, Revel is building, we're on a mission to basically build like the world's largest sim-ready library of products, various different types of products, you know, starting with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and eventually millions of different products.

2:37Brian Walker:and then we use AI actually LLM to say okay if you take this type of tool and a humanoid what are the instances that the tool would be used in the real world that make it useful and the LLM basically creates the training simulation parameters and then we run various domain domain randomizations of different frictions and different environments and slightly different offices of gravity and things like that and it's quite wild where you can achieve with simulation versus real-world training and like a single GPU two-hour training you can you know compare to like a ten years of training in the real world so really you know really high curve of how much more you can get done in simulation and then you can run perils to those simulations right so you can even Xolari did more and more and more.

3:38Yeah, that's a huge volume of data. We had a guest on a couple of weeks ago talking about OpenAI's physical tool. And, you know, it was a founder of an AI company who I guess plays in a similar space more to scale AI, but a lot of the data infrastructure behind LLMs essentially. But he was saying that the next big AI moment is going to be in physical AI. and he was talking about how the open AI device is primarily going to be like a data capture tool to capture data of the physical world. Do you think that's the case? Do you think a lot of these companies are now going to be moving into the physical space to try and capture all this data that doesn't yet sit within AI?

4:18Brian Walker:With physical AI? Yeah. It's just a graveyard. If you look at some of the interviews with chief AI engineer over at NVIDIA, Jim Fenn, or even Jensen himself, you know, Elon and Brad over at Figure, you know, the founder, everybody's kind of on the same page. It's pretty much a graveyard for data in terms of physical AI and robotics. So we kind of have to create data. And I think we're going to see a huge boom because, you know, the humanoid AI robotic, like the humanoid is essentially more of a consumer electronic than like a car or something because you know and i i think i think faster than you saw like for example the adoption of uh consumer electronics like drones like uh uh you know for uh adoption you know drones been around for forever even for camera for filmmaking but when it made mainstream when dji and some of the other brands kind of introduce the consumer adopt, you know, layer, that's where you really saw sort of a kind of a huge adoption.

5:29Brian Walker:And I think that's the same thing for humanoids that I think we're going to see is, you know, once they sort of hit people's homes, the kind of explosion of different companies providing of different services and data to make them useful will be, I think, will be pretty huge. And I think we want to be, of course, one of the early companies that focuses on that. Got it. And have you got views on which humanoid robot companies that you think are going to come out on top? Or do you have views on what those companies need to be focusing on to come out on top? That's a good question. um if you want me to pick like uh uh well i mean tesla has the infrastructure and scalability down pretty well with their car manufacturing and battery manufacturing through the gigafactory and all of the other sectors and when it comes down to making 100 units of the humanoids it's one thing when it comes down to making 100 000 or a million units it's more of a supply chain kind of a logistical question i think and i don't know if anybody else is better set up for that right now than tesla and so i think the optimist might take a lead for sure for for some time and then nvidia just announced that partnership with foxconn right so they they also have a pretty extensive experience in manufacturing of course and consumer electronics so they seem to be like they could be also the ideal candidate and i i think that tesla and nvidia will be sort of at the forefront i think figure is going to make something really amazing as well i really like uh where what they're doing and the current version and the figure three is just around the corner to be revealed i think to the public um you know brad kind of give us some hints of some of the things that they were able to improve with the helix model um like folding the laundry i don't know if you saw that that was pretty cool and um yeah they'll i think they'll be they'll be like in the top five you know and we'll see what boston i'm not sure what boston dynamics will do and then you have electronics and then uh out of i think they're out of austin texas they're pretty incredible uh they actually have a pretty long history of making robotics or making robots and then china man uh what do you think what do you think about china because uh the videos and some of the the companies that are coming out of china especially with like humanoids is uh been pretty incredible i've seen some really really cool ideas like uh multi-battery backpacks uh in humanoids so that you can swap its own battery and put a new charged battery and then change the second one without losing power uh right so like you have essentially two two batteries powering the unit you swap one that's drained you put a fresh one and then you can change the other one without ever powering down i think that's uh like we you know hot swapping so to speak right i've seen that with some uh consumer electronics as well you know there's some consumer electronics that allows you to kind of hot swap batteries without rebooting the system i think that was a pretty that's a pretty fantastic idea um i think security will probably be in question with chinese robots right like will people in America or Europe want to have sort of a Chinese humanoid robot with camera sensors ears and vision and whatnot in their house kind of roaming around and really being up on your business if the software and sort of the you know the data might there might be some possibility of security breach I don't know what do you think about the Chinese catching up to the to the robotics yeah i think chinese the chinese are always a sort of like a dark horse we sort with the lms and there's i think there's probably going to be more that we're going to see out of china in terms of building uh amazing models right and i think we're going to see more of it following deep seek um but yeah i think we definitely can't you can't cut them out but i think you're right i think it's going to be more geopolitical than whether they have the ability i mean they're like the manufacturing hub of the world you know they have the ability to scale massively they have uh yeah they have the ability but yeah i think it's to your point whether it's geopolitical whether they're going to be able to sell to the west or not but i think they're going to have amazing robots amazing models that at least will serve china and a lot of the asian market um but i'm conscious when you've got you for 20 minutes i also want to talk about project lovable uh and the amazing story of you like acquiring a company that was uh built in 20 hours so like just to kick off like how did you first get involved in Project Lovable?

10:20Brian Walker:So first of all huge fan of the project and what Kitty is doing there and Harry over 20 BCs and just the whole team there but essentially look when I was born and raised here in Europe and I when I was 20 I basically moved to US and then spent majority of my adulthood in US through film industry and tech. And it's been like 18 years now. I have not been back. And my wife and I, we have a three-and-a-half-year-old, soon to be four-year-old. So we wanted to be closer to our family for a little bit. So we relocated to Europe for some time just to kind of see how it is. When I got here, I knew I wanted to do something.

11:01Brian Walker:I wanted to continue Revel. I wanted to take it to the next level and see what I wanted to do. And I started to kind of look into the talent and how it works here in Europe because really my adulthood and company experiences have been sort of in America. My co-founders and my team and the majority of the people that, you know, I've worked with was always based out of U.S. and or bringing talent from Europe to here. So I kind of wanted to see how, you know, how things work here. And I came across on LinkedIn, just came across Kitty and Project Europe. And then I was like, oh, cool. and then they announced this hackathon in Stockholm and I was like wow that's really cool there's going to be a lot of talent there and then there was one group one team that really stood out for me and they made this video and they they made the challenge even more challenging like can we build a real company and sell it in the the time frame of the hackathon and it all started with just one comment I basically commented on Charlie's one of the team leads post about, hey, Harry, if you want us, fly us in.

12:07Brian Walker:Harry liked it. Kitty reached out and said, okay, you guys are in. We'll fly you in. Come to the hackathon. And at the same time, I commented, I'll buy the company right now, kind of in a mic drop emoji. And Charlie reached out and he was like, wow, what a message, Brian, right? And I was like, okay, I'll match the price. I'll give you guys 20k and i'll buy whatever you guys going to build they loved it and within a few hours they kind of turn around says hey brian what are you doing what's revel they checked out my linkedin what's revel i told them they're like that's amazing love robotics love the simulation humanoids all that um is there something that revel needs that we could build during the hackathon and i was like yes and so we can adopt the the hackathon project project ray which is revel intelligence Ray are like revel AI basically and we were going to build this tool internally anyways and then it was just this like opportunity to see what this talent can do and I I was like we're in I'm doing it and and and we kind of got the ball rolling and they agreed they loved the idea and they develop this little internal feature for us that allows our project, our company to reach out.

13:31Brian Walker:As you can imagine, when you're building the world's largest digital twin library from all these different product manufacturers, you need to reach a lot of decision makers and a lot of companies in general. So how do you learn the language of these different companies in terms of how to do business with them, how to approach them? so we basically had the team develop an agentic tool for that an ai agent that goes out and reaches out to thousands of these different manufacturers and the right executives and starts from bottom up kind of warming up layers and layers layers to where like you know i got connected with some ceos of companies that are doing like 14 15 billion dollars in revenue a year and they're like oh what are you doing okay this is interesting let me connect you with the decision maker in our company and then we kind of go from there so uh so yeah it's been it's been amazing i think we're going to polish the tool and and kind of keep working on it uh and making it better and better um because i think it can do a lot of good in not just the industry that we're in but we can actually sort of sell licenses of that feature um to other industries which we actually did also at the hackathon like as soon as i bought the company I called up my friend, Xenia.

14:44Brian Walker:She is in fashion. They make custom suits. Her company is called Vestium. And I said, hey, I have this opportunity. Do you want to buy a license of this tool? And I sold it to her for 20K for an annual license. She loved it. She loved what it was going to do for her company. She's been long talking to me. I've been advising the company on kind of going AI first and kind of restructuring her company. So a lot of crazy things happened all at once. It was like an acquisition. You know, the hardest thing was that all this conversation, all the team getting into the Lovable project with Harry and Kitty and everything and me giving them the money for the acquisition and all that, all that kind of decided on Friday.

15:34Brian Walker:The hackathon happened from Monday to Tuesday. it was my wife's birthday on Monday and we had plans to go to Prague and do like a little romantic thing my parents were going to watch Leia our daughter and then I kind of had to sell it to her like hey how about we go to Stockholm instead of Prague and she was like okay so my wife actually came to the hackathon with me she like hung out with Kitty and she was there and then we had nice dinner and then I stayed the night with the guys just working on the project like in the true style of a hackathon and yeah man that's kind of how it happened you know it was just like came out of a comment really just like I was like hey let me just buy the company right now what do you think yeah it's bonkers so you bought the company and you immediately sold a contract for 20 grand and so now you're going to be using it both internally and licensing it out and selling it to other companies as well right yeah like literally five minutes after the acquisition they they did the company i i i acquired the company officially and the guys are trying to figure out if we broke some guinness world record with the fastest acquisition actually so i stay tuned for that and then um and i called my my friend i told her about it already kind of prior and i was like time to make a decision you're in and she's like i'm in she wired the money so she made a purchase you know now now i've like revel fully acquired the tool and the product and everything and the company and now we rebranded under ray and revel and then i sold the license to a completely different industry that we're in a fashion you know and and then since by the way since that was on monday that the day of the hackathon right there in the morning since i've had now locked four other fashion brands into the same license so we hit by the end of last week we're what are we are wednesday yeah last week like friday saturday i locked in 100k in arr basically in the first week of the existence of no way yeah that's crazy wow so your roi on that tool is already insane it's been a week yeah yeah and and so basically um but i love the team I love Project Europe.

17:52Brian Walker:I want to support Project Europe. I had a conversation with Kitty yesterday and NVIDIA, and we're planning on doing something like this hackathon, but trying to do something bigger and super focused on robotics, like humanoid, and basically give people the resources and the things they need to really do something amazing. And hopefully, Revo will be at the heart of it we'd love to do it here in Prague like heart of Europe bring the best robotics engineers and robotics companies from around the world you know right here in Europe hopefully we can get Kitty and Project Europe behind it as well you're talking to Nvidia about partnership and sponsorship and then a lot of the product manufacturers that we're partnering they're kind of big brands and obviously the tools that we are digitizing for them are in the library so we're thinking doing like a another hackathon where it's like okay you use the revel kind of like lovable you know you use the front end to build the app on this hackathon you take revels library you select one of the tools from the you know the team select one of the tools that are available as a digital twin in the library and then they take their robot and they have certain amount of days here in prague hopefully to create something some demonstration of something really useful, you know.

19:12Brian Walker:So a lot of crazy, cool things came out of this thing. I couldn't be happier with the team. And the tool itself, Ray, I think we're going to now kind of keep it as almost like a separate division of the company. And I offered Charlie, the team lead, and the team that were at the Project Lovable. I said, hey, guys, you know, I'm going to put some equity on the table for you guys. and if you want to take it from here and help us scale this to another sectors I already closed licenses in the fashion and we can continue grind there I'm sure we can get 10 20 30 40 50 more customers relatively easily through the connections we already have and then you know it could go into real estate it could go into all kinds of different you know it's a really unique lead gen warm-up kind of a tool to get you in front of the people that can make a decision to invest or to um you know partner with you in some kind of a you know style like that so yeah um i i think uh charlie would be a great ceo so i i offered him to basically spearhead the project ray if he wanted to and i think he i think they're going to i think we have a few conversation he's pretty excited about it and yeah that's crazy it's such an incredible story i was talking about it with somebody the other day and i was saying this is just like an amazing use case because you know 20 grand is actually the price that you paid is actually quite cheap to get some of the best engineers in europe to build a tool for you non-stop for 20 hours like your hourly rate is actually pretty good yeah a team of five is what like 200 pounds an hour you're paying each person um so it's like an interesting model i kind of wish i had done it myself like there's a bunch of things that i wish some of those people would have built for me and my business doing media and stuff um it's an amazing story and actually i'm definitely as soon as we're done here I'm gonna write a post up about it because it's just an amazing story to go oh by the way thank you for live streaming the entire event what a what a challenge of its own too that was awesome yeah it's an amazing experience yeah yeah I mean it's crazy just to be in the room with everybody until I get to speak to them as they're building and to sit down with Anton and Harry but yeah like I'm you know part of the media business that I'm building is I want to do a lot more things like that to sort of like bring Europe closer together and And to get people who maybe they can't attend Slush, maybe, you know, that it's expensive.

21:36Maybe they're not in the industry, but they're super interested in tech. You know, put on some live streams of Slush so that everybody around Europe can feel part of it and can feel connected to the ecosystem. And do the same for like Italian Tech Week or Bits and Pretzels or, you know, hackathons like that. You know, anything that like brings people together. I spoke to somebody yesterday who said that he woke up at 6 a.m. to tune back into the hackathon. He'd been watching it like all night and he set his alarm for like 6 a.m. and tuned back in because he just loved like the atmosphere and watching it.

22:06Brian Walker:I think we need more of it. You're you kind of listen. It was you know, it was very strategic on my end. Right. Like we we were going to build this tool internally with our engineers and Revel. And there was this opportunity and like 20K was you're absolutely right. And on top of that, they're working on it now because, you know, through the hackathon, we got some kind of an MVP. But the deal I made with the team and they're super honorable and like, you know, I said, like, I need a working tool. And that like with all the bugs and everything kind of worked out. So they're kind of, you know, polishing it afterwards.

22:41Brian Walker:And to also give something back, I said basically, hey, guys, when this is all said and done, I want to offer you guys some equity to the entire team, whoever wants to continue this going forward. And, you know, we can take it to the next level because it's hard to come by a talent like that. And the concentration of the talent that was at that hackathon was really just mind-blowing. So it was a bit calculated on my end, you know, like for sure. And then also like I wanted to meet with Harry and I had a really wonderful conversation with him. and my wife had a really good conversation with him.

23:19Brian Walker:Had a really great conversation with Philip from Createm. Had a brief interaction with Anton. It's really great to see, like, just you got to meet so many really cool people. Frederick was there. I forgot. It's one of the, he's like an entrepreneur. I think you had him on. He started a company with, like, the Scooters, you know, in Stockholm. Yeah, Voy. Voy, yeah. Voy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was amazing. like there's so many great people there yeah so we loved it it worked out uh we're moving forward listen my phone exploded after uh we after we kind of start posting uh you know i got hit up maybe by 50 75 vcs i've already had like 7 10 calls um everybody's interesting in ray and everybody who found out more about revel and what we're doing in the data layer for the humanoids they want to be part of that so some incredible connections already came out of it some amazing engineers reached out to us so yeah man like i've look i really couldn't be more happy you reached out and you're like hey let's talk about the story on a podcast um i just did another one earlier today at like 11 i had another podcast with a really really great guy out of out of germany has a really cool podcast and yeah i just love what you're doing and i'm happy that we connected it um and that you're doing this congratulations i'm super stoked to be on your uh the first uh first uh well you've been doing the show for a while but i guess the rebrand of it right and the the focus shifted a little bit so yeah exactly i think it's a great idea i love it no well thank you brian look i'm conscious we're out of time but like i've i've i've loved chatting and i'm so impressed by like the the acquisition the spinning up of the revenue i'm i'm going to be posting about it probably later today because I think it's such an amazing story um but look thank you so much for joining me and like yeah I mean let's just stay in touch because I'm sure we're going to be going to similar things and doing similar things across Europe um so thanks Brian you got it man thank you so much for having me it was a pleasure so