Standard Bots raises $200M Series C at $1B valuation, targets 10% of all US industrial robot deployments next year

Speaker 1: Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is in the waiting room. Already, have Evan Beard from Standard Bots. He's the co founder, CEO, chief engineer, and he has a massive to announce. How are you doing, Evan? What's going on, Steve? Good to meet you. What's You're looking extremely sharp. The occasion? Introduce yourself. Tell us what's going on.

Speaker 11: Thanks so much. Evan Beard, CEO of StandardBots. StandardBots is America's largest maker of AI native robots. Announcing today our series c, so raised 200,000,000 at a $1,000,000,000 evaluation, and we're announcing also Congratulations. For the gong. Yes. Now the fundraise is official. Yeah. Fantastic. We're also announcing we're quadrupling our manufacturing footprint. We're growing so quickly. We expect next year to be 10% of all US robotics, industrial robot deployments. Wow. So how

Speaker 1: small is The US industrial robotics? They all come from Germany and Japan or China? Like who are the major players I mean, obviously, it's important to to re industrialize. But it feels like for such a young company to get so much ground, like we really have to be behind the ball here. Right?

Speaker 11: Yeah. Last year we grew 10x year on year. We are behind the ball. When I first started the company, I did like Combinator. Cool. I looked around and realized I wanted to start a robotics company. I realized that almost all the robots, it's like 99.9% of the robots used in The United States are not made here. Yeah. So so that's the kind of starting point. And then you try the products, and you have these menus that have like a single letter in them. It's like crazy stuff like you would expect from, I don't know, like mainframe computer type. Like Yeah. It's beyond any other software I've ever seen. And so we realized we could make something 10 x better. And then with AI now, obviously, you can train a robot by demonstrating a task. Whole new way to train it can be more capable, handle more variability. So that's what we do. Yeah. And it's probably not sold to like a technical audience. Not like Stripe for humanoid robots or industrial robots exists. The buyer's probably

Speaker 1: some firm that owns a whole footprint of manufacturing plants and they just say like, stick it there and figure it out later. Yeah. So has

Speaker 2: the journey so far been about finding product market fits? Or has it been about just delivering an American equivalent of products that are already popular?

Speaker 11: Yeah. It's a great question. When we first started so I talked to a 100 different manufacturers and I asked them, do you like your robots? Who programmed them? Can I play with them? How long did it take? What are they doing? It was really from the beginning, we knew exactly what we needed to build. And the and from the beginning, the problem was actually building it. It wasn't like, what do we build or how are we gonna reach the people or do they want it? And and what's been consistent from from the beginning of the company, we did our seed round around 2020, has been, we build the next thing that we know people need and we see even more takeoff and even more accelerated growth. So that's been it's mostly been a technical problem which is what I wanted when I got into this whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's great if it's great if demand is is is all there. How vertically integrated do you want to be? I've heard a lot of

Speaker 1: FUD about actuators and small drone motors and all these different pieces deeper in the supply chain. You hear about the American company that is the brand or and it's all made in China or then the American company that's making the product for the for the American brand but then all their parts are made in China and and we're going through this process of working through the entire supply chain. Let's just say this, John. He made he made that tie. That tie is a standard standard BOTS tie. Here we go. He's gotta go all the way. You gotta go all the way. I didn't imagine. I don't if Nike's Yeah. I try to do do I rep the American brands, but we're trying to make every single component of the robot with this fundraise in The United States, and we've already designed most of it. So we designed our own motor. We designed our own motor controller.

Speaker 11: Like, we we wrote the original firmware. I wrote the original firmware to do all the motor control. 60,000 times a second switching electricity to, you know, make the magnet and the electric electrical the electrical electromagnet. Yeah. You know, so so we we vertically integrated on a really low level. Yeah. And now it's about vertically integrating the manufacturer as well. So that's the next step here.

Speaker 1: What is demand like for American made industrial robots? Obviously, you know, people online, commentators, investors have gotten the memo about the importance of reindustrialization. But if you're just, you know, some American manufacturer, like you might not have the money, you might not really care, your customers might not care, like how resonant is this idea? Yeah. Is is part of it people just like knowing that you guys will be stopping by the factory

Speaker 2: and things like that? Like how are yeah. Basically like how are you differentiating besides like the country of origin? Yeah.

Speaker 11: Yeah. I know. So we our whole focus is training through demonstrations. So we have made made it so that an average assembly worker or manufacturing worker can train a robot and with our next software release, they can train an AI model too. And so this is it'd be the equivalent of if you could fine tune, like, ChatGPT without any kind of software engineering degree. And we make it so simple and easy to show a robot what it is you want it to do and then have the robot go and do it on its own. And I don't none of the other incumbent robots there so far in the past that I don't think they're even beginning to work on this. And I think that there is a real potency to vertically integrating to be able to make the hardware and the AI stack and the software altogether because you can make it work better. And so that's what we do and that's what we've been focused on. And I think that it's it's that combination that allows you to go address all these tasks that otherwise you just can't automate today.

Speaker 2: Are there many robotics led manufacturing robots? I'm thinking like, you know, a PE firm says like, hey, there's like a very specific type of manufacturer. They haven't adopted technology as fast as they could. We're going buy these companies, combine them and, you know, let's say roll out standard bots across their whole

Speaker 11: fleet. We are working with a couple of those types of private equity firms. We have, you know, many hundreds of customers now. So there are some of those. It's a lot of just, you know, we so we've got small and medium businesses in almost every state. We have iconic Fortune five hundreds, oil and gas, data centers, aerospace, automotive. So really spanning the gamut there. But it's people who are making the things that make America, the manufacturing components, also the end products that we use, and that that gets us up out of bed. Because what robots are today are really they're the tool for us to make our economy and our country manufacturing affects one third of GDP, one third of all jobs. And so if we can move the needle on those things, it moves the needle for the country. And that's why I've been I've been to testify to congress twice in the last few months, and this is a it's really across the aisle. There's agreement that we need to dominate robotics as a country in this next and so I think to to your other question, it's very important, I think, that all the components are made here because we don't have this supply chain here today. And you don't want to have something that is so fundamental and foundational to the future of this country not made here. It's just not a good good play for for our kids. Last question for me. How do you see humanoid

Speaker 1: robots fitting into our robotic future? How do you think they fit in, break down? I'm always shocked by this this stat that I think Amazon employs like a million humans but also a million robots or they've deployed a million robots while scaling their workforce into like the tens and hundreds of thousands. And there seems to be some synergy there. I imagine that there's a lot of energy around humanoid robots but there's so many situations where you want a robot that just bolts to the floor with a lot of power that can just move a steel beam that a human can't perfectly Yeah. Repeatedly via demonstration learning. But how are you thinking about that adoption curve? Because I imagine there'll be some takeoff and exponential growth. But give me some nuance on what you're seeing on the ground.

Speaker 11: Yeah. Our view is for a controlled environment factory filled warehouse that a legged humanoid is it's going to be more cost, more unique parts, but it's also going to be less efficient. So you just have a a worse ROI. Yeah. So we think maybe humanoids are right for the home, but then you have the safety issue. Like it Yeah. When it's going up the stairs, you need two five year olds to be able to jump on the back of it and pull it, try to trip it. It's the home alone test is what I call it. The home alone test. Yeah. Yeah. But I think we're years away from because like you see RL, robots flipping with RL and it looks impressive. I think the average person thinks like, oh yeah, it's all soft, robotics is soft. But I think to solve the to beat the home alone test, it's we don't you know, RL is not quite there. And it's hard to simulate all the things that an eight year old could do to to so you can't even do the RL right now. Right? Because we don't simulate all the soft bodies and the meshes that are cutting. So it's it's an unsolved problem. I think it's going to be years away from being solved in the home. And in the factory, we make it as you said, there's a lot of applications where you just need a static base Or maybe you you you you maybe some you need is mobile based, maybe you need one arm, maybe you need four arms. Yeah. So we have a flexible platform where you can kind of mix and match depending on your needs, and we think that's the best ROI, the best performance. But humanoids are better at one use case. Do you know what it is? Raising money. So If

Speaker 1: I mean if we're doing the home alone test at scale we're going need to rat massively revamp child labor laws because the five year old, the eight year old, they're going to be working forty hours a week paying for college, just beating up humanoids in some in some designed house. This is important work. No. I'm sure they solve it some other way. Synthetic data perhaps. That's a good Anyway That's a really good line. That's a good zinger. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Mark. Congratulations. Yeah. Congrats to the whole team. Appreciate what you're doing. Glad you guys are doing what you're doing. And looking sharp. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Have a good rest of your day.