Robert Playter

Now, our discipline is that we need to go find applications that are broad enough that you could imagine selling thousands of robots, because it doesn't work if you don't sell thousands or tens of thousands of robots.

If you only sell hundreds, you will commercially fail.

And that's where most of the small robot companies have died.

And that's a challenge because A, you need to field the robots, they need to start to become reliable, and as we've said, that takes time and investment to get there.

And so it really does take visionary investment to get there.

But we believe that we are going to make money in this industrial monitoring space because if a chip fab, if the line goes down because a vacuum pump failed someplace, that can be a very expensive process.

It can be a million dollars a day in lost production.

Maybe you have to throw away some of the product along the way.

And so the robot, if you can prevent that by inspecting the factory every single day, maybe every hour if you have to, there's a real return on investment there.

But there needs to be a critical mass of this task.

And we're focusing on a few that we believe are important.

ubiquitous in the industrial production environment.

And that's using a thermal camera to keep things from overheating, using an acoustic imager to find compressed air leaks, using visual cameras to read gauges.

measuring vibration.

These are standard things that you do to prevent unintended shutdown of a factory.

And this takes place in a beer factory.

We're working with AB InBev.

It takes place in chip fabs.

We're working with global foundries.

It takes place in electric utilities and nuclear power plants.