Eden Robotics is building wheel-based robots that charge $10/hour to work in factories — no robots sold, just labor

Speaker 1: All of these things were just in higher stakes territory, I suppose. Anyway, we have our next guest from Eden Robotics in the YC Demo Day stage. How are you doing?

Speaker 7: Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. All good. How about yourselves?

Speaker 1: We're doing great. Thanks. Great to meet you. Much. Introduce yourself and the company.

Speaker 7: Yeah. So I'm Stam, CEO and co founder of Inno Robotics. We're making general purpose robots for manufacturing warehousing initially and everything else right after that.

Speaker 1: How general? Are we going humanoid? Are we going wheels? Are we going

Speaker 2: Semi humanoid. What does that mean? Centaur? Yeah. Centaur. So the body, the legs are there's four legs like a Human

Speaker 1: yeah. Semi humanoid. What what does that mean?

Speaker 7: So that means it's a wheel based robot. It has wheels but it has two arms which are placed like a human in our shoulders same way we have and it also doesn't have Dexter's hand. It has grippers.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: Which fun fact can do more than 80% of work in industry.

Speaker 1: Interesting. What about the the wheels are important to decide? Like, a lot of manufacturing facilities have very flat floors, so I imagine you don't need really any stair climbing ability, which some wheeled robots can do. But do you need to be omnidirectional? Do you need to change path? Is it just about optimizing battery life? Like, what are the trade offs that you decide when you're building the base?

Speaker 7: Yeah. So so when you're building a base really, when you're going with wheeled, it's not going to be as general purpose as legs. Yeah. Like legs could go anywhere. Yeah. But it doesn't have to be and you have a massive gain in both cost and energy. Yeah. Legs are extremely expensive in terms of energy Yeah. And also in terms of like simply cost.

Speaker 1: And also, I imagine you can put way more battery pack on top of like the wheel base. Right?

Speaker 8: Yeah.

Speaker 4: That's Half our half

Speaker 7: our base is just the battery. Yeah. So half the base is just the battery and then the other half is the compute. Yeah. And that's

Speaker 1: it. So how how long is there some sort of, like, sweet spot for once you have a robot that can roll around and do work in a manufacturing plant for six hours without needing to recharge? That's the sweet spot. You know how, like, 300 miles of range was like the sweet spot for electric vehicles and under that, you start getting range anxiety?

Speaker 7: Yeah. So I think six hours is too low. Mhmm. Right now, our robot is using a car battery. It can run for twelve hours. But with our own

Speaker 1: Not an electric car battery, just like one of those like bricks Yeah. That's a car battery.

Speaker 7: Exactly. One of Wow.

Speaker 9: Just a

Speaker 7: just a really big car battery. Yeah. And with our own car battery design, it can go for twenty hours and optimize charging for like these four hours and Yeah. Not have to like stop for four and work for twenty but like optimize throughout the time to charge enough.

Speaker 1: You got a car battery in there. You're thinking about putting a v eight in there maybe? Why not? Probably not. So one

Speaker 2: of the you know, we've had a bunch of robotics founders on. Mhmm. I've been trying to understand what what some of the kind of like economic challenges there's gonna be to rolling out, you know, humanoid esque robots. When I see some of these humanoid form factors, I'm thinking like, look how many different motors it has, how much wear is each of each of the motors gonna be taking at any at any given point. And then like trying to run the number on the run the numbers on like the what is the cost of the unit? What is the depreciation gonna look like over the year? How often are you gonna have to be repairing different components to actually make it competitive with a human which you can hire for let's say 30 to $40,000 a year depending on minimum wage in a, you know, a certain area or type of role. Because like the the, you know, aside from humans being like cool and funny, they also go home after work and they feed themselves and they repair, you know, they they sort of are repairing them, you know, repairing themselves while they're sleeping. Right? So that's like sort of off balance sheet sort of like activity that's happening that ultimately benefits the business because somebody goes home, eats, sleeps, and then they come back to work refreshed, ready to go.

Speaker 7: That's a crazy way to describe human workers. But

Speaker 1: I get it.

Speaker 2: But but but yeah. I'm just like comparing comparing these two things. A robot, it doesn't go home at the end of the day. It might need to be repaired. It might need to be updated. And it doesn't happen unless unless the company actually pays for it.

Speaker 7: So the biggest kind of like hardware risk factor is just the actuators. Really nothing else would require maintenance. Everything else would be able to last pretty long time. Right now, we're at this point where you have actuators that are actually good enough to last like three years and last this over usage. It used to be that these actuators would overheat very quickly, and you would be able to run for a very short amount of time. And there are some humanoids today. Like, example, unit three robots, they're very famous for overheating very, very quickly. But there are actuators in the market and we are using such actuators that actually can sustain long hours of operation. We're running for example for ten hours during alumni demo day. It didn't there was no hardware issue when it came to the actuators and it it went pretty reliably. We expect that these kind of actuators would have a useful life of about three years. And in the case of the maintenance so the our whole thing, by the way, is we're not selling these robots. So we're selling the labor. And in fact, we're not even leasing them on a monthly basis. We're charging per hour. So we're charging a $10 per hour, which is actually found that customers love that idea much more than they love the lease idea because they have no mental framework. Right? Mhmm. They have the mental framework of a human worker. Mhmm. And so the the maintenance would go is if a customer has a robot somehow breaks, there's a problem with it.

Speaker 2: And sorry.

Speaker 10: Is it is it

Speaker 2: per hour that the robot is actually running?

Speaker 7: Yes. So it's per hour.

Speaker 2: Okay. You're not just saying I'm gonna charge you twenty four hours a day for this period. It's like they're you're they're only paying if they're getting actual

Speaker 1: You're used to paying Yeah. $20 to get across town. You pay Yeah. $20 to get across town.

Speaker 7: Exactly. We do set minimums, obviously, because we need to keep the hardware at the facility. But it's just whatever is enough for us to keep the hardware there. Everything else is adapting based on usage.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. Mhmm. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming.

Speaker 2: Did you did you already get the round done?

Speaker 7: Not yet, but we're very close.

Speaker 1: Good luck.

Speaker 5: Love it.

Speaker 1: Good luck.

Speaker 2: Great to meet you. Come back on soon.

Speaker 1: Have a great one. Thank you.

Speaker 7: Have a good one.

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Speaker 2: Breaking from semaphore. Yes. Netflix lost out to Fox in in pursuit of Roku.

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