Matic raises $60M and scales to 6,000 home-cleaning robots after key pricing lessons

security. And up next, the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

And yes, we do have a surprise guest who wasn't on the lineup, but he's joining. We have

Mahul from Madic.

From Madic.

What's going on?

Hey guys, thanks for the robotics mastermind.

You're gonna you're gonna love this. I uh the other I think it was two nights ago uh my youngest uh one and a half walked in the other room.

Uh and I was pretty quick to uh chase after her, you know, cuz she's very very active. She can destroy a lot of things. And I go in uh the other room and she has the the like, you know, soap dispenser of the Madic and she has it fully [laughter] fully vertical. Fully vertical trying to drink out of it. And I was so appreciative of your design because nothing came out.

Wow.

So your view, but I was so worried for a second cuz it like looked like she was just trying to chug.

No, that could end up very messy, potentially harmful. Who knows?

Anyways, so so excited to have you back on. We've been loving our Maddox and uh I know you have some big updates.

Yeah. What's new in your

uh uh well, we just announced today that we've raised uh $60 million in next round. So

So led by Yeah.

And by who?

Uh led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Vic Mill

is joining our board. And we've had

Thank you. And we've had some amazing investor Gavin Baker at Tradies. Oh yeah, Antonio Gracias at Valor, bunch of other joining on their own. So it's great. And then for us, this is sort of the output of the product we built and shipped. Um yeah, I don't think this would have happened without us shipping. So that's been the good part of it that it's not about the demo. It's about based on real product, real usage, real customers.

Yeah.

Real real robots, thousands of them, real out in the real world doing doing real work. Uh

yeah, we've we've dead. Sorry to jump in. We've shipped more than 6,000 now and have cleaned about 110 million square feet.

There you go.

Which results in 80,000 mi travel. So quite a bit.

That's amazing.

That's wild.

Uh talk to us about uh pricing and willingness to pay. Obviously with modern AI, robotics, everything that you're doing, you're creating more value for the customer. And correct the I mean the sales show people are willing to pay more than the previous generation which I feel was like more of a three-digit price point. Um and we were we were talking about like will people really pay $50,000 for a humanoid $100,000 like that feels like a big jump but what are you seeing in terms of just willingness to pay for robotic processes amongst consumers?

So so uh great question um we actually launched first time in April of 2023. No one cared. But we started as a robotics as a robotics as a service.

Um and and we tried to uh launch it as a subscription and that was like an organ rejection. That didn't work at all. Uh so people are definitely not interested in paying yet another subscription. That's another one thing we learned. Then we priced it at about $1,500 plus subscription as an attachment in November 2023 and learned again that that didn't work as well. that that was the price point at which a lot of people weren't yet convinced that at least the robot uh vacuum or or uh this could do a job. So we really took that feedback to heart and then eventually priced it much much lower introductory price of about $9.95 and now it's because of tariff we've had to raise it a little bit but really

what we learned and this was our thesis to day one that if you take a step back and think about it there is literally zero ubiquitous consumer electronics device priced higher than $2,000. Mhm. Yeah.

Beyond $2,000 it's presumer or you pay for cars,

right? There is literally nothing even bucks now.

Yeah. That's why I think the humanoid robot roll out is going to be just really brutal because you're trying to get adoption of a new product that is still in very much like going to be in an R&D phase and you're asking people you're asking people to pay

car money.

But counter point. Exactly.

Piggyback rides. You could take it to work, replace your car. You [laughter] hop on the back.

It's a car that will clean your house. A car that can do the dishes. And

I'm hopping on the back. Give me a piggyback ride to work. And then while I'm working, you're going to go around and clean and do all sorts of I don't know.

Well, well, ADI is coming. Maybe it will just do the work for you. Maybe we'll go there. They will be an iPhone TV.

No more commutes, but you will need a clean house. So, you will buy a Madic robot in the future. That's exactly right.

Well, I mean, talk about the AGI process, the process in the models. We're seeing like incredible advancements all over image, video models, reasoning models, agents. Um, are you seeing just or natural improvements to the performance of your fleet? Is that just something that rolls out for free? Are you doing your own training runs? like what what what have you learned or integrated from the progress in just just fundamental AI research over the past year?

That's a great question. We started with this idea that AI is coming and AI would make progress and and that has always been part of it and we are taking advantage of VLMs and SAM 3 and all the open- source model that are available to us. But at the same time one of the things that we had realized on day one that at least when it comes to home uh getting data given the privacy that consumers want especially at this price point um was going to be a challenge. So we knew so we knew so that just like Tesla sold a car collected data and now is moving on to autonomy and and robotics in the same exact way the robotic vacuum was our veg that's the way we wanted to get inside home earn customers trust build a brand and also a data veg and we knew that if we build it the right way by doing everything on the device and earn customers trust they will share data and that's actually one of the most interesting thing that the long tail with which we actually need all that data is coming in and customers are willingly sending it to us and they're curating it for us as well because we know this data is actually error oriented. So that's like incredibly helpful. And if you take a step back and think about it, even for humanoids, if you had a humanoid in your home, you don't want it to step onto that dog poop or cat vomit or get tangled up in wires or rug tessles or, you know, uh maybe uh uh um squeeze your or break your kids toys or dolls, right? So every single thing that we do actually directly leads into it. So our thought was always that hey instead of sort of building a humanoid in day one let's grow a robot. Let's grow uh Rosie the robot and we'll solve perception first just using floor cleaning space and then we can worry about manipulation and kind of think about what would kids be able to do it between 5 to 10 year and can we enable that sort of functionality and make product useful and then ultimately get to

kind of insane to think about like the actual reality of a humanoid using a regular vacuum you know just like dragging around a vacuum or using a Dyson it's like is that really the most efficient way to like clean a floor is to have this huge robot like humanized robots. [laughter]

Actually, it was in that movie by Centennial Man. I remember that with Robin Williams and and he was using the regular newspaper and he was doing it and we're like, "Wait, that doesn't make sense." Like, you know, do you

like we have this humanoid really amazing intelligent robot, but our appliances never change. So, there was always this idea that it has to evolve in both ways.

Yeah. Any uh any traction or plans on the enterprise side? I'm thinking like hotel rooms. They need to be incredibly efficient. Every minute that a that someone is in there is a minute they couldn't be somewhere else. Uh do you have plans there or is that just a total distraction?

At the moment hardware that we've built is really just for homes. Yeah.

Um I did put one in hair salon and it works fine. We did put some in hotels and everything. So perception and algorithms wise it is working across the board. We do have people using it in their uh daycare centers, churches, schools, animal hospital that we've seen use cases. So there is an opportunity there. But I think that would require a little bit of a hardware tweak and then we just have to question is it really about savings time which is really what we want to do or is it about just saving costs and if it's saving cost then it may not be as interesting of a problem but if it turns out there is a labor shortage oriented one then we really need to go and look into it.

What about lawnmowers? Uh lawnmowers is something we want to stay inside home for a while for a bit. Okay. What about the the reason lawn mower think about it? It's like uh you guys would make it a fantastic lawn mower, but I've never once thought like in between when the like the landscapers come to my house. I've never once thought like I wish my grass was just like a little bit shorter today.

Perfect every day.

Like cuz they're just coming every week. Whereas in the home in the home it's like your house can always be cleaner.

Yeah. Every day. Every day. What about [clears throat] what about an ad supported tier? It says, "Hey, I'm on Lenolium. Why don't you upgrade to hardwood? We'd love to connect you with this local." Have

you considered NordVPN? I see I see you're spilling you're spilling a lot of vegetables on the floor. Why [clears throat] not Athletic Green?

We've been talking to Eric Sue for too long today. He he got us thinking on ads and everything.

So, what uh what what what's the plan?

What's the plan for this year? Like just scale, sell a lot more robots. Do you need to be in Best Buy and and retail distribution at some point? What? Yeah. What do you

uh not at the moment. Luckily for us, uh at the moment, we're still supply constraint. So, we would keep selling and doing build to order model that allows us to keep working capital low and the goal is really to scale. We scale about 20x last year selling from 300 to 6,000 robots. Now, we're Thank you. and and try to go uh another 10 to 20x this year. That's the goal at the moment. And there is a second product in the work. I won't be able to go into much details yet, but there will be some exciting.

We tried to guess it and all of our guesses were way off base [laughter] a robot that you could take a picture. He's like, "No, you guys are not even close." Anyway, thank you so much. Congratulations.

Great to get the update.

Always great to have you on the show.

Yeah, I love I love

And we appreciate your product. Nothing. You know, we talk about robots a lot on the show. love a robot company that with a real fleet out

and I think Dian's joining today telling that we're still growing without advertisement although we will need some at some point

we will yes have a great rest of your day we'll talk to you soon

great to get great to catch up cheers