I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
The market is definitely there, and Kuka was sold for $4 billion, but whenever venture capitalist are involved, the hype machine is activated and it's difficult to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
Definitely not.
I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins.
Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Lol. Lmao, even.
More like in turkey amirite lol
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
What share of the investor money is from USA?
Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Promus are American. Greenfield is Israeli, and Kindred Capital is British.
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
The market is definitely there, and Kuka was sold for $4 billion, but whenever venture capitalist are involved, the hype machine is activated and it's difficult to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Ain't that a kick in the head?
Ain't that a hole in the boat!
What is the SOTA in AI for robotics today? Is there much progress? Or is everybody too much focused on the LLMs now?
Why do you think it is separated?
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
And not sure what RobCo is doing exactly, but LLMs are probably part of it as well.
Some further reading on the LLM-and-robotics aspect in addition to your link:
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
https://drivingbench.com/
> Robotics-as-a-Service model
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
Imagine a robot bricklayer. Some big construction companies may buy them outright, but for smaller projects, it makes sense to simply rent them.
Those have existed for quite a while now. For smaller projects it is cheaper to get a human.
aaS means you don't even rent them, you just pay someone to come and lay a certain number of bricks by any means necessary.
what is it with people choosing evil corpo names
Indeed. The name was well established in the popular Fallout game series before this company was founded.
Reminds me of the first time I heard about the "Palantir" company...
Edit : typo
The fact a defence company is also called Stark is quite amusing, if not for the deadly weapons.
Evil often wins and makes a lot of money. Also effective if your target audience is evil billionaires with brain rot.
this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?
Effective in this attention economy.
Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.
But maybe most people don't have half a brain.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
Well, it seems their fastest growing market (and largest?) is in the USA.
They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.
The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.
Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t it a similar market?
Who is dismissing it?
People here work in the US tech bubble. The behavior you describe is indicative of fear.
news.ycombinator.eu
SCNR
Isn't the $1B unicorn number from like 2015? I feel like that's a pretty typical series A/B valuation at this point.
For Silicon Valley, maybe. But this is Europe, where things are still rooted in reality.
so the website is basically called it physical AI
Hype for the inevitable NYSE IPO!
Capital Markets union is coming :-)
Cries in dystopian
Just as long as the CEO’s name isn’t Robert House, I guess
I was expecting to be disappointed at seeing another humanoid robot that can fold laundry BS startup.
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
folding laundry is not useful?
Definitely not. I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins. Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
> I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.
I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.
At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
Yeah, that assumption is correct. So doing laundry for others as well wasn't really something I was considering.
Will this also be a Russian scam?
What is this a reference to?
Wirecard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal
How dare you!
Germans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.