Ali Attar on Lightberry's natural-language OS for humanoid robots and a just-closed deal with Unitree

interesting to see what robots we're talking about, but we have him here in the studio.

Welcome to the show.

Hello. How are you?

What's happening? Uh light berry owning yellow. Verticalizing yellow. I love it. I love it. You know, we have to wear something different. Everyone's wearing like gray and blue and black and like we need to stand out. So, yellow underrated color. Underrated color.

It is. It's awesome.

Great to have you on the show. Uh why don't you introduce yourself? Give some quick background what you were doing before starting Lightberry.

Yeah, of course. Um so, yeah. Hi everyone. I'm Alli. I'm one of the founders of LightBerry. Um we're effectively just building the operating system for all robots that any person can use a robot. Um before this I ran a browser company called Sigma OS. I was running product and design there and I went through YC in summer 21. Um very cool. So that's me.

Very cool. Um talk more about that. Uh this feels like a very big opportunity

but uh I'm not using a lot of robots in my day-to-day life today. I I assume that I assume that I will be

uh much more in the future. Uh but yeah, talk about what the business and the product looks like today and where you see the kind of category going.

Yeah, so um we literally have a humanoid robot upstairs right now uh MCing the entire event for demo day and you know he's fully autonomous. He talks we give him some instructions about like how he should behave for the day and he's just acting like a part of the event staff. Now you can go out there right now and just buy a humanoid robot from at least 50 different manufacturers. But if you do that,

who who did you buy yours from?

So ours is from Unitry. It's a Unit robot.

Did you buy it on walmart.com?

Because I know they sell I know they sell

Un. No, no, no, not at all. No, no. We actually work directly with Unitry. Um, and so like, you know, if you buy a robot from them or any of the 50 others, like it it literally doesn't do anything. It can't talk. You can't teach it anything. You can't The only way to interact with is by writing code. Uh, we thought that's insane. And so we're building a software layer that allows literally anyone to use a robot by just talking to it.

Uh what uh yeah, what what does adoption kind of look like with this? Like how are you actually selling it? Is this something that you want Uni to uh kind of uh encourage their customers to adopt? Because again, I'm sure any manufacturer of robots doesn't want to just sell to developer hacker types that uh happen to want to go through all the different hoops in order to uh actually get value out of a out of a humanoid.

I mean, that's exactly it. You hit the nail on the head. Like, we're working directly with the manufacturers. There's like over 50 of them. Uh we actually just last week closed a deal with Unitry. Uh they're like they correspond to like 90% of market share in the world. I'm giving you the air horn, but I have encouraged various government officials [laughter] to ban Uni Tree from the United States.

Oh, no.

So, well, look, you know, the truth is like they're the only ones shipping. Like, we want to work with the American companies, too. We want to work with literally everyone. Uh, but Unit Tree is shipping. They have market share, so it just makes sense to ship on them. Uh, we're going to be selling LightBerry powered robots with them all over the US. But we're also working with other companies, some European ones, some American ones. Uh,

yeah. What's happening? Uh, so I would imagine 1X has no interest in in partnering with external providers. That would be my sense. Maybe that maybe that changes in the future, but I know they're they're trying to really verticalize and I'm sure they want to create a personality and some of the same feature set, but uh what about other other players in the US, Figure, Optimus, etc. I mean the truth is like they're just not shipping yet and when they want to start shipping and right now they currently don't have any software that allows you to interact with the robot. There's nothing that works in a public space. Um I heard that Figures deal with OpenAI just fell through. I don't know if that's true but like that's the rumor. We we'd love to help all of those companies get to market faster. Uh it's just a race right now. So it's like whoever needs software so that you can interact with the robot we're here to help. What do you think the uh the most dominant form factor for robotics in daily life will be in just maybe like two or three years? Do you think we're going to go through like a like a wheeled robot phase or uh or you know one robotic arm on a Roomba phase? Like how do you see because the the self-driving cars are sort of here, the Roombas are sort of here. um the the h full humanoid robot that feels a little bit farther out. Um but is there going to be more of a transitionary phase in your mind?

I mean, if you look at sci-fi as an indicator of what people want, we don't just want humanoids. There'll be different kinds of robots. Uh you're going to have some like small bipeedal droids that, you know, we work with a few companies that do that. You're going to have wheeled robots for like delivery. That's just more practical. In homes, I actually don't think you'll have humanoids cuz like why do you need locomotion in those cases? Humanoids are going to be the first like general purpose form factor that's going to make it in my opinion just because you know they look like us and the reason why we're building humanoids is because they be they look like people and so we'll just be deploying them in people facing roles. So like shop assistants, um manning booths at events, MCing at demo day, right? Like we have done this before. We deployed like a fully functional autonomous humanoid at the 11 lab summit uh like 3 weeks ago and it was just working there for 10 and a half hours like fully autonomously alongside the staff. Um so yeah, that that's that's what we do and and and we think that there's going to be tons of different form factors. It's going to be like a Cambrian explosion of robots.

What are the compute constraints like? Do you uh do you think ondevice inference is going to be really important?

So we run a hybrid pipeline. Uh we rely heavily on the cloud because that's where the best models are and people prioritize the quality of interaction more than than you know like the reliability of it.

Sure.

Now we also run it as I said hybrid. So we have an offline version that's also running in the same time. So if you know connection drops or anything the robot will still talk to you. It'll still understand. It'll be less smart but it'll know about it.

Yeah. uh have you had any luck uh h I mean how do you think about like personality development and uh I've been very fascinated by the fact that pretty much no lab has been able to hammer out of the model like the it's not this it's that like they all have this specific LLM flavor to them that I don't think most humans maybe I run into one out of a million people that talk like that but they all kind all the robots talk like robots and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about where that all goes. I think prompting is just I mean these models are getting more and more steerable and they're better at following instructions. Yeah. So as long as you do a great job of spending time on designing those interactions, you'll be able to get these robots to behave less like robots. Now we're not trying to make robots that, you know, behave just like people. Like people love C3PO, but C3PO is very obviously a robot. It has a robotic voice. It's a bit awkward in the way it speaks. And like that's the inspiration. It should just be like smart enough, but it should still like behave and follow our social norms. Like the robot should look at you when you're speaking to it. The robot should be wearing the outfit of like the staff members that it's representing if it's at an event. Um, and that's what we're here to do. Like we're we're just here to make that easier for all of those manufacturers cuz they're racing on hardware. They don't have time to think about the software and the interactions.

Are you are you excited about robot pets as a category? I know dogs are are substantially cheaper and that feels like something that a robot pet doesn't need to necessarily add any value outside of companionship and so it feels like a potentially a an area uh where we could see a lot of growth uh in in the near term.

So we we actually have like a little pet droid in our office. It's like a bipedal that kind of looks like R2-D2. Uh we we brought a bunch of little robots to the event, too. There's like six of them in the demo for anyone who's here. Um, yeah, I think robot pets are going to be really big. It's just we're we started working mostly with humanoids just because the price point is so much higher that we could just focus on quality rather than like trying to optimize for cost. Obviously, as these robots get smaller, the cost gets lower. And so, you know, for us, we just want to we just care about quality. The models are going to get cheaper, too. So, we'll be able to like deliver on like toys, pets, um, in the near future.

Yeah, the toy the toy market seems really really interesting. Um,

yeah, our first customer was a toy company actually.

Just so much lower in my opinion.

What about security? I I feel like there's a potential use case for humanoids just having a human-shaped thing just just moving around. So literally the landlord the landlord of our building when he um when he he saw that we moved in he stepped into our office and on day one he just asked us like oh so these things can talk and they can walk around they can map the world I was like yeah and he was like you know what I would love to deploy them for security how much does it cost and I told him it's going to be like around 60 to 70k. He's like I want four. I was like okay deal. So like he he already pre-ordered them. Like people want this for security not because it can fight not because it can harm people. These things can't but they're like the best deterrent.

Yeah, it's just

it's the best deterrent and like you know we can literally talk to weird people in the evening and say like who are you and like run facial recognition like are you meant to be here and then just alert like whoever's on like on guard at staff and and just call them and and ask for help. Like that's how it should work, right? Robots to help people, not not to replace them.

Yeah. I I do think it's interesting that a lot of these humanoid companies are focused on the hardest possible thing, which is replacing like a house a housekeeper

who is already not the highest comped person

doing the most like intricate specialized tasks where somebody that's a security guard, their prim primary job is to just stand there and look

like they're paying attention and that's like the job and they make like

the same amount as a housekeeper.

Yeah.

Yeah. We don't think we don't think the chat GPT moment for robotics is going to be the day that your robot will know how to fold your laundry.

We think it's going to be the day you start seeing robots everywhere in the street or like in shops, in coffee shops, in in events, like talking to people. Um,

and that's just really soon.

It's going to be fun.

Very cool. How's uh how big's the team?

Uh, we're just a small team of three people. Uh, we have a few people that we're working with that are helping out on top of it, obviously. Um, but yeah, it's just a core team of three founders.

Amazing. And how's the round going?

It's been very fun. I mean, we we managed to close it like pretty early. Uh, there's a lot of there's some interest now because, you know, like we're with the unitary deal. We're pretty close to a series A milestone, so we're trying to like discuss that. We'll see.

There we go. Series A time. Love it.

Let's go.

Uh, really great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you for coming on and excited to meet you guys. Have a good one.

Cheers.

Bye.

Yep. Um, up next we have Dome, a unified API for prediction markets. This should be fun. It's trying to sit on top of

Pick a favorite. Pick a favorite market.

Well, there is a lot of arbitrage to be done. Um, on on the uh on the topic of robots. I I'm just I'm super excited about the lamps that are happening. Have you seen that there's two robotic lamp companies now? They're like they're

One of them was just CGI, right?

I I I don't know. Maybe both of them were CGI. Isn't Apple making their own robotic?

It just feels like something that can be done. Whereas if it's, you know, full humanoid tomorrow for this much money like that feels like a taller order. It's going to be a couple years away. But the lamp I feel like we can do today. The lamp can talk to you. It's going to be funny. It's going to be awesome. I'm excited. I'm really bullish on the lamps. Um, but I'm also bullish on a unified API for uh for prediction markets. So, we'll bring in the founder