Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Befot Robotics
Speaker 1: closing another round of funding today million a series be
Speaker 1: funding led by Tiger Global, bringing the company's total funding
Speaker 1: raise two over forty one million. So with how they're
Speaker 1: going to use the money, look at the business. We
Speaker 1: have so many questions for the next guest. Very pleased
Speaker 1: to have in the studio with us. Samuel Reeves, the
Speaker 1: founder and the CEO of fort Robotics. He's with us
Speaker 1: in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio right now. Samuel, good
Speaker 1: to have you with us. Congratulations on the round. I
Speaker 1: want to talk about the company in just a second,
Speaker 1: but first, what's it like raising money in an environment
Speaker 1: like this. It's certainly a challenge, but we're attached to
Speaker 1: a big macro trend. We're we're a part of the
Speaker 1: Fourth Industrial Revolution, and regardless of what happens in in
Speaker 1: any momentary downturn um, this is a generational shift in
Speaker 1: the way the world works. So there's still a lot
Speaker 1: of money out there, and if you look at one
Speaker 1: there's there's still a lot of dry powder, So there
Speaker 1: is But was it was it noticeably different raising this
Speaker 1: round in terms of how long it took, the conversations
Speaker 1: you had to have, the time it took from you know,
Speaker 1: talking to these LPs to actually get him to sign
Speaker 1: on the dotted line. Give us some color there. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think automation is unique. So what what what was
Speaker 1: noticeably different for us is that the world is now
Speaker 1: bought into the idea that everything is going autonomous, So
Speaker 1: we're we're kind of special in in that way. Robotics
Speaker 1: funding is still going strong, so I think a lot
Speaker 1: of folks are seeing a turn down. But but we
Speaker 1: actually had had a lot of interest in the round
Speaker 1: and ultimately came on a set of partners we're really
Speaker 1: happy about. We'll tell us a little bit more about
Speaker 1: your business. You guys have been around, correct, um, so
Speaker 1: tell us because it's not like you're creating the cool
Speaker 1: elon mosk cumanoid robot. You're stuff, but you're controlling the
Speaker 1: devices and you're also playing into the security side of this.
Speaker 1: I explain a little bit about what you guys do.
Speaker 1: Who are some of your big customers? Sure? Sure We're
Speaker 1: a fork is a communications platform for smart machines. So
Speaker 1: we have this union fusion between safety and security that
Speaker 1: enables us to deliver information to these machines that they
Speaker 1: can trust, and so that lets them address what what
Speaker 1: globally we term as the huge risk of the next
Speaker 1: generation of automation. So just come out and say it.
Speaker 1: They're they're going to kill us. They're not gonna kill
Speaker 1: us if they have their fourth platform. But this is
Speaker 1: the this is the you know. So it's not that
Speaker 1: you're making the robots, right, No, no no, no, we were
Speaker 1: to help other people make them. Yeah, you have the
Speaker 1: platform that helps people program them, communicate, communicate with them. Right.
Speaker 1: And and the fact is autonomous robotics are still is
Speaker 1: still a developing field. I mean ai IS has has
Speaker 1: reached a great point of development, but it's still in development.
Speaker 1: These machines are still perceiving the world and and acting
Speaker 1: in the world in a way that UM is in progress.
Speaker 1: And so if they're going to be moving around in
Speaker 1: unstructured environments around people, that poses a huge amount of
Speaker 1: safety risk. Conversely, if they're connecting to the internet, they're
Speaker 1: all connected to the internet, and so they're all exposed
Speaker 1: to huge security risks. So whether it's safety risk or
Speaker 1: security risk. There's a lot of risk on this this
Speaker 1: mega trend. So that's that's what we're out here to
Speaker 1: help people address. Well, tell us a little bit about
Speaker 1: some of your major customers, right, you play in the
Speaker 1: O E M market. I mean I'm thinking we're housing, agriculture, construction, manufacturing, mining, transportation, delivery.
Speaker 1: I mean you play into so many aspects of our world.
Speaker 1: Tell us about some of the customers, what kind of
Speaker 1: demand you're seeing, and what it tells you maybe about
Speaker 1: our you know, our macroeconomic environment. Sure, so, so we
Speaker 1: have about three customers about those are really big, big companies.
Speaker 1: So fortunate with thousand sized customers. Um they Oh so
Speaker 1: so you'll in your public I'll be able to actually
Speaker 1: put up on a boombag function right. So so, so
Speaker 1: it's interesting we're integrated into everybody's technology roadmap, so so
Speaker 1: we hold a lot of proprietary information about what all
Speaker 1: these companies are doing. So they get really touchy about
Speaker 1: us talking about them. But a few that have that
Speaker 1: have been public about about using forder. Toyota Material Handling,
Speaker 1: they're the biggest forklif manufacturer in the world. Boston Dynamics
Speaker 1: you've probably see very YouTube friendly, right, So they did
Speaker 1: the sixty minutes where one of our products had a
Speaker 1: little cameo UM appearance. Hexagon, big Swedish conglomerate. They make
Speaker 1: control systems for pretty much every production environment like that.
Speaker 1: So tell me about the demand you know that you're
Speaker 1: seeing from such a cross section of so many different
Speaker 1: industries that play into our global economy. What's the demand
Speaker 1: that you're seeing and what does it tell you about
Speaker 1: We're all at this juncture right of trying to figure out, okay, recession,
Speaker 1: what's next. Europe's dealing with problems, Asias dealing with problems.
Speaker 1: We are dealing with problems. What does the outlook and
Speaker 1: the demand based on what you're seeing, what does it
Speaker 1: tell you about the economic outlook? Well, I mean I
Speaker 1: think everybody, um, everybody that makes a machine and everybody
Speaker 1: that uses a machine is thinking about automating it um
Speaker 1: And this this came from the labor shortages that were
Speaker 1: that were pre COVID. I mean, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of discussions the labor shortages now in the post COVID
Speaker 1: world where you know, you like Heathrow Airport today saying
Speaker 1: their curtailing flights because they can't have enough workers to
Speaker 1: move the luggage around. Right. But this was a fact
Speaker 1: of life for people in farms and warehouses and factories, welders,
Speaker 1: you know, pre COVID. So the automation journey has been
Speaker 1: something that has been happening for decades, and so I
Speaker 1: think macroeconomically, people are still investing in this. They see
Speaker 1: it as a way to smooth production. They see it
Speaker 1: as a way to bring back production into their their
Speaker 1: home area. You know, we got a minute left and
Speaker 1: then we're gonna come back with you and do a
Speaker 1: lot more, Samuel, But before we go, talk to us
Speaker 1: about when you you know, make your trip here today
Speaker 1: on the train from Philadelphia and you look around and
Speaker 1: you see where are the areas that stick out for
Speaker 1: you that are just right for automation. So when you
Speaker 1: when you when you drive to the train station, you
Speaker 1: could be in an autonomous car. When you get on
Speaker 1: the train, you could be in an autonomous train. When
Speaker 1: you pass the warehouses on the way to New York,
Speaker 1: you your seeing autonomous warehouses. You're passing autonomous factors, You're
Speaker 1: passing autonomous farms. When you pass a golf course, turf
Speaker 1: care is going autonomous. When you're in an office, I
Speaker 1: bet your cleaning machines here are are either autonomous or
Speaker 1: thinking about becoming autonomous. Retail stores are becoming autonomous, and
Speaker 1: that's what that's, you know, before we get to the
Speaker 1: really visible things like like the cars that have gotten
Speaker 1: a lot of attention lately. I do think about it.
Speaker 1: When we were flying a bunch to like how much
Speaker 1: more we were doing and we'll talk about this. The
Speaker 1: experience wasn't great. I remember, Carroll, were filled together and
Speaker 1: You're like, Okay, who do I give this to? And
Speaker 1: I'm like, there's sorry, Carrol. There's nobody here, nobody around,
Speaker 1: and we were taking care of everything. And I do
Speaker 1: think about it retail increasingly, I do self check out
Speaker 1: like they you know, all right, we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: that because that has implications for the labor market. Although
Speaker 1: there's the flip side of this and meeting people who
Speaker 1: knew how to make all the stuff that you're doing.
Speaker 1: We're gonna come back to Samuel Reeves, founder and CEO
Speaker 1: at fort Robotics. This is Bloomberg. I want to get
Speaker 1: right back to our guests. We are talking with Samuel Reeves,
Speaker 1: founder and CEO at fort Robotics. It's a safety and
Speaker 1: security platform autonomous machines. He, by the way, is also
Speaker 1: previously a co founder and president at Humanistic Robotics, and
Speaker 1: he's here in our interactive broker studio. UM I want
Speaker 1: to get to something that we were talking in the
Speaker 1: break because I think it'll be interesting to our audience
Speaker 1: because I do wonder we hear we hear robotics or
Speaker 1: we hear autonomous and we're like, Okay, what does that
Speaker 1: mean for global workforces? How do you see it in
Speaker 1: terms of what you're doing and how this might play
Speaker 1: out well. As we talked before the break, labor shortages.
Speaker 1: Labor shortages are nothing new to the economy. UM Covid
Speaker 1: accentuated it and made it, made labor shortages really on
Speaker 1: the front of a lot of people's minds. But farming
Speaker 1: and manufacturing and warehousing and retail have all been dealing
Speaker 1: with labor shortages for a really long time. So when
Speaker 1: we talk about this new generation of automation where machines
Speaker 1: are really thinking and acting on their own, what the
Speaker 1: promises is that you can create a human machine team.
Speaker 1: We're together. The production is a lot more safe, and
Speaker 1: the corporation that uses this, this human machine team is
Speaker 1: a lot more productive. So we're not talking about replacing
Speaker 1: tons of workers. We're talking about taking an existing bunch
Speaker 1: of workers in any given scenaria and making them a
Speaker 1: lot more productive with the human machine team, which allows
Speaker 1: them to basically segregate what each party is good is
Speaker 1: good at. I mean, the humans are good at interacting
Speaker 1: with each other and interacting with other people and making
Speaker 1: critical thinking decisions and things like that, and so we
Speaker 1: should enable them to do the things that make them human.
Speaker 1: And then machines are very precise and predictable, and they
Speaker 1: should do things like that. But it's not only about
Speaker 1: productive right or the right mix. But you also, you know,
Speaker 1: it is interesting what you said to Tim and I
Speaker 1: in our break is that you know this is a
Speaker 1: way of kind of leveling out labor costs globally, right, right, Absolutely, So,
Speaker 1: so as as the cost of production rises in some
Speaker 1: of the global places where production goes now and automation
Speaker 1: over here automation capability increases, I think we'll be able
Speaker 1: to increasingly move production back to localized areas in the
Speaker 1: United States where consumption can be right down the road
Speaker 1: from the factory and the warehouse that distributes the good.
Speaker 1: And what that could do is make companies more responsive
Speaker 1: to local populations. UH, could create jobs, UH in places
Speaker 1: where there there weren't jobs, could make our manufacturing and
Speaker 1: warehousing work um workforce a lot more competitive globally. And
Speaker 1: so I think we've just discovered how brittle supply chains
Speaker 1: are when they're spread stretched out globally, and we've just
Speaker 1: discovered that that their massive labor shortages. And I think
Speaker 1: automation really addresses both of those, Samuel, I want to
Speaker 1: get more into the technology here, and specifically, if you
Speaker 1: allow companies to operate robots in a safe and efficient way,
Speaker 1: how do you do that better than other companies? Like
Speaker 1: how do you create a system and I want to
Speaker 1: use the term unhackable because never want to say that,
Speaker 1: but but how do you create a system that keeps
Speaker 1: out bad actors and that also allows these things to
Speaker 1: operate in a way that's safe to the people around them. Sure,
Speaker 1: so we've really focused on communications. So we've we've invented
Speaker 1: a way to fuse what's called functional safety and cybersecurity
Speaker 1: to create a way that these machines can communicate in
Speaker 1: a way that they can trust the information that they're getting.
Speaker 1: So what they get on the safety side is super
Speaker 1: highly reliable information like ten knines of reliability, so that
Speaker 1: they can use that information to make decisions about how
Speaker 1: they move. And on the security side, you know, we
Speaker 1: start with identity. We start we we use the identity
Speaker 1: to create authentication and then make sure that they're authorized
Speaker 1: to talk with only certain parties. We borrow a lot
Speaker 1: of the techniques that have already been created in the
Speaker 1: human world. I mean a lot. A lot of these
Speaker 1: techniques have already been established to make humans secure in
Speaker 1: their activities on the internet, but they haven't really been
Speaker 1: applied to machines yet. So we took we took that paradigm,
Speaker 1: we applied it to machines, We fused it with safety,
Speaker 1: and we created this unique fusion of safety and security
Speaker 1: so that all information that machines process can be trusted.
Speaker 1: Does it ultimately have to have a human? Though? Is
Speaker 1: the final kind of safety check? Like you can have
Speaker 1: multiple layers, right, But I do wonder ultimately doesn't have
Speaker 1: to be a human putting in some code or like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Like I think about what we do,
Speaker 1: they still needs I don't know. I think it's an
Speaker 1: interesting theoretical question. Do we want machines to get so
Speaker 1: smart that they are not out of out of the
Speaker 1: realm of out of the control of humans, And I
Speaker 1: would say no. I think the promise of this kind
Speaker 1: of automation is like one human to very many machines,
Speaker 1: and that's highly productive. But you always want a human
Speaker 1: in the loop. That's what our platform allows you to do. Well,
Speaker 1: continue to stay in touch and let us know how
Speaker 1: things are evolving. Thank you for any incoming attacks and robots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well we need a red phone. Yeah exactly, let's know
Speaker 1: when the anchor robots are coming the control. No, No,
Speaker 1: let humans do what humans are great at. That's the
Speaker 1: whole thing. I agree. I agree. Um, really nice. Thanks
Speaker 1: for making the trip up to see us. Our trip down,
Speaker 1: trip up, trip down. Thanks Samuel Reeves. He's founder and
Speaker 1: CEO of Fort Robotics. I need a robot to help
Speaker 1: me geographically. I'm terrible. I'll show you Google Maps during
Speaker 1: the break here, all right, then, well then we'll figure
Speaker 1: it out.