BrightAI raises $51M to deploy AI-powered monitoring across aging US energy and water infrastructure

coming in the studio. Um, but let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions folks. Um, interesting. Um, what else do we need to cover today?

There are a bunch of posts we've been through, but we have our next guest here in the studio. We will welcome him in. How you doing? Welcome. Welcome, Alex. what's happening. Hey guys, thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for hopping on.

Um, give us an intro, break down, uh, who you are, what you do for everyone who's listening. Yeah, so I'm CEO and founder of Bright AI. Uh, we build physical AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without.

So things like uh, energy grid, uh, you know, power supply, uh, water infrastructure, HVAC, pest control, and all those things.

So we have a platform that lets you kind of real-time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and uh solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of like labor shortages. Yeah.

You know breakdown in the aging infrastructure, sustainability challenges, all those things. Is the customer more government focused or private companies? They're private companies now.

it sort of touches uh touches everything you know these these services have obviously every everybody alive is a consumer of these things um you know and as a result of that there's plenty of government involvement but uh they tend to be owned privately in the US so big utility companies um service providers you know pest control operators like all different sorts of companies and then you've got this crossover interest with the you know the national interests and so on as well where's the strain the worst right Now across those different areas or like where are we seeing the most strain?

What's the evidence of the strain? It's uh it's pretty severe everywhere. So like the US has got a you know if you grade the infrastructure it's like a C minus or a D.

So most of the critical infrastructure was built you know just before and after World War II and it's like of course like typical American plan with a 20-year lifespan. we'll figure it out afterwards. And now it's just, you know, in a lot of places it's like really held together with duct tape and and wire.

And uh so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure.

Um and then you have a labor force like a systemic labor problems because older like older technicians are aging out and sort of it's a bigger economy now I guess you know it's still cool work to do but younger workers are just not signing up for the journey to be a you know 25 year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces.

So all that's crushing I mean to give one example would be like water infrastructure. Like 30% of the water we clean up leeches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere. Like my town has wooden pipes if you can believe that. It's crazy.

I mean I know about I know about all the lead pipe that that our country depends upon to deliver water to uh to homes which is concerning. But wood pipes sound too a good thing. It feels like an aqueduct. I'm I'm down. Give me a wooden. It's probably safer. I don't know. It's like something a beaver.

I don't know, but it's uh it's bad. It like the fresh water's leeching out and the bad stuff is leeching in. Yeah. Yeah. So So uh you're active in a bunch of different industries. What is like what does the go to market been? What is even the sales cycle look like?

Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like we're going to help you leverage AI and it and it's looks like you know kind of Palunteer's forward deployed model. Uh are you doing something different? Yeah, it's in that zone. I mean we bootstrapped through the first 100 million in revenue.

So it was like I was trying to figure out that that path path through uh path to we need we need a word for bootstrapping to a hund00 million run rate and then and then raising some capital later but it it it needs its own maybe it's Hawinson's uh Hawinson's uh model something like that. There you go.

Well, I've uh I've raised too early a bunch of times before, so I can like give warning shots that other founders, but believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out, but I had to figure out that go to market. All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms.

So, it turns out that they're, you know, private equity kind of sits and and uh basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure. And so and they're also very aligned with like 5 to sevenyear cycles where they want to drive change like big Ibidog growth and change in these in these industries.

And so that's where all of our first customers have come from. So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms as sort of their their secret weapon for physical AI. Yeah. Uh what yeah what's the latest news on the fundraising side? Yeah. So, we uh we just uh raised a $51 million a uh congratulations.

Thank you. Yeah. Co-led by uh Kla Ventures. Fantastic. And inspired capital and uh we picked those guys because you know Co Kla's super badass. They were you know the first and earliest check in OpenAI big lean forward into sort of the future of abundance. Yeah.

Yuri, you know, there and then inspired is a lot of people don't know about, but a New York-based firm. They're deep in infrastructure specifically and uh super great founder operators, you know, and all that. So, it's uh it's good.

Do you see do you think the company will always be a software more of a software provider? Is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy the and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it, you know, better than other players in the market? It's a good question.

uh you know we provide a lot of software and hardware today.

So our platform combines we have yeah we have like sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers and it ties all this like crazy distributed infrastructure into one big like physical AI learning loop if that makes sense and uh we found some industries like are more efficient than others but like the most efficient one we found like give you an example is like 50% of the time they send a technician out there's nothing to see.

That's the most efficient way. We found a lot of them are like 90% of the time you send somebody out there's nothing to there's nothing to do. Um but you still keep going in case it goes really bad.

And so, you know, I think in some of those industries where you get we're seeing 90 plus% productivity gains that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value unlock happen in the biggest way. But, you know, we'll see.

Right now, we partner deeply with these operators. It's a great great way to go fast. I was actually a customer of your previous company, Smart Things. Um, what's the through line? What are the lessons that you learned from the first IoT company to new IoT devices?

Uh, what what are the biggest lessons from that story, man? Uh, well, you're you're welcome and and sorry, I guess you know that where it landed for you, but uh my things was amazing. It was um you know, we grew it to today it's like 500 million households. It's, you know, more than two billion connected devices.

Pretty big platform. Yeah. All over the world. Um, I guess what I learn, so I learned a lot about scaling and sort of making IoT work. You know, it's it's matured a lot since then. And so, um, you know, those things are good. I think I I feel like I was solving the wrong problem, though.

So, my wife hated the not to say this in a bad way, but she like progressively hated the company more the more time went on. Like like wants regular light switches and stuff like she doesn't always know.

That was my that that was my experience like I it was like magical and then slowly like little like like hiccups creep in and those like the expectations of software and hardware or modern technology is that it's perfect because it's a computer and it's a robot market you know it's not a big enough yeah exactly um I' I'd love your take on Sonos we've been talking about Sonos a ton um what do you think they need to do to uh make the make the app open faster.

I open the Sonos app. It takes me 90 seconds to adjust the volume and I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned. Maybe I should, but I'm negative on Sonos, but I've gone through two like hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house and then eventually same thing. And uh it's in an orphan stage right now.

I think I just donated a bunch of like great gear. Okay. Yeah, it's the most they have like the best sound and all that stuff, but talk about like missing the software opportunity like every stage in the company. Totally. And uh you know I just don't see you know it's sort of Alexa's sort of faded out in a way.

Apple home is not going anywhere. The Google Home stuff hasn't really like Sonos has this opportunity to like own they could be the thing that like unlocks things like chat GPT. Yeah. John's idea. My idea was was Sonos is trading at what like 1 billion market cap or something. Yeah.

Uh my idea was OpenAI literally bought they shipped like 5 million devices. ship a ton of devices and OpenAI has fantastic engineers. Whatever the engineering problem is, they can fix it, I believe. I don't know. It's a wild license Scarlet's voice this time.

And like, you know, seems properly uh not the not the not the dumbest crackpot theory we ever come up with. But, uh, we will leave uh the the wild riffing to the next one. Thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations. Congratulations to you and the team. Really really tremendous progress. Great news.

Good luck out there. get in the future. All right, we'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. And up next, we have Chris from Waves coming in the studio. Symphonic Labs