Walden Robotics exits stealth with $300M raise and Toyota partnership to deploy physical AI in manufacturing

if it can do our benchmarks, our internal tests, see how it stacks up. But uh up next we have Russ Ted Drake, co-founder and CEO of Walden Robotics joining us for the first time with an exciting launch.

How are you doing Russ? Welcome to the show.

I'm well. How are you?

We're great. Great.

Thank you so much for taking time on a big day. Uh please introduce yourself a little bit, the company, and then we can go into the news.

Awesome. Yeah. So, uh I'm Russ. I've been a professor at MIT for about 21 years.

Wow. 10 years ago, uh, Toyota started a lab right next to MIT and right next to Stanford. So, I helped I was the SVP of robotics and then large behavior models at TRRI.

And now I guess I do podcasts right after Gus the T-Rex, you know. So, that's a tough act to follow. Tough act to follow.

Um,

so, okay, let me tell you about Walden. So, Walden just came out of Stealth today. Super excited about it.

We're deploying general purpose robots, you know, powered by physical AI. They are we are super focused on manufacturing, super focused on deployment. I think the next great lessons for physical AI, they happen in the field. You know, we have to deploy these robots, figure out how to mesh them with the manufacturing processes that are already fantastic.

Uh, okay. You're out of stealth now, so your competitors are going to be picking over your launch video and any podcast that you do, trying to figure out uh how you're thinking differently. uh how how how do you think differently about these use cases versus maybe some of the other companies in uh in the category so far?

There are a lot of robotics companies now, right? I mean, it's actually awesome. It's probably exhausting for you guys, you know, but

we love we love any anything but uh another CRM. Maybe not to pick on the CRM founders of which uh

we love

we love.

Okay. But there are a few things that are finite in the world. I think one of them actually is the number of big strategics that can really take this the distance. So one of the things that's just very different about us is that we've got a huge relationship with Toyota and now we're building new relationships with you, if you've seen the announcement, we have um we're working with Boeing, with Samsung, Logis, we've got an incredible team of that, you know, kind of the the best you could possibly ask for in terms of advancing manufacturing.

Yeah. you know,

so and and then and then why why is a partnership like that so exciting in this category? So using the CRM example, if a founder came on and said like we're partnered with this big company and you'd be like okay well like what's the most they could possibly spend on CRM and it would be like maybe it's like5 $5 million a year or $10 million a year. But but for you, I could imagine Toyota spending effectively like billions of dollars a year on robotics over time. Is that why starting with

it's not the capital? I mean the capital is flowing. I mean you have to be able to move capital to be successful but that's that's table stakes I think. Um so robots are hard right? It's going to take a long time and you have to think about not just building the core technology you have to think about manufacturing it at scale. you need to think about distribution, you know, marketing, insurance, how do you repair them, you know, in in locations all over the world. So, if you look across like all industries on what kind of a partner would you want for this? Um, I think the automakers are in a really good shape, you know, for uh for putting out things of this complexity at scale, you know, having a dealership in every town. I think there's a lot of reasons to really like uh the automakers as a as a real leverage point on this.

Do you have an idea of the scale of robotics deployments currently in the auto industry? Obviously, you're very close with Toyota, but uh you know, even 20 years ago, we all saw, you know, the the the you know, the robotic arm putting the windshield on the car, moving the heavy frame. So, it's not like there's never been a robot in an auto plant. Uh the question is just what is the next step? I think there's some companies that are betting on going straight shot to humanoids. I think you're taking a more iterative approach. But what does the walk crawl run of building a car with a robot actually look like?

Okay. So it's really important to um start by acknowledging that there are a ton of robots in factories already, right? So welding, painting, you know, there's places where big robots have been extremely successful for decades.

Yeah. We're also seeing cobots all over the place. AMR iss all over the case. Autonomous mobile robots all over the the case. This is like really successful. Um, but there are still a bunch of tasks that are fundamentally hard to automate. Um, sometimes impossible, sometimes uh just too expensive, right? They're they're kind of one-offs or or we want one robot to do multiple tasks. There is a disruptive technology from physical AI. And um the the fundamental question is like how is this going to change the way we think about manufacturing? And it's not just here's one job that we couldn't automate before. This is completely going to change the equation for how we think about production. Um it's going to make a data enabled factory.

It's going to uh change variability in manufacturing process in a way that could like really change the fundamental production systems. So we're trying to introduce this core technology of general purpose robots.

Yeah. And then I've heard you guys ask before about sort of the special purpose versus the general purpose. I do think there's another future of those robots specializing into more narrow applications and getting, you know, something that's really task specific.

But I think there's a time right now where the generalists will come in and do a lot of the tasks that have been hard to automate. We'll get the data. will bring this new capability and then there'll be a second round of automation where you go in and the tasks that are worth special purpose, you know, they're they're valuable enough for a special purpose robot. Then you'll go in and you'll optimize and you'll make your um you know, your special purpose robot for those tasks.

Well, the robot the general purpose robot would hopefully make a special purpose robot.

That's of course right. You actually

uh what

robots are building robots? Yes.

Yeah. What was um I I'm assuming over the last 20 years you had a million opportunities, a million VCs that said, "Hey, why don't you spin out and build a robotics company?

What made you maybe pass then and and do it now?"

Yeah. So, I've been watching the the capabilities mature. We were at Toyota Research. We were actually some of the core innovators on some of the algorithms that really kind of, you know, started this boom in physical AI. watched them get better and better but a lot of things had to align. So I mean certainly the capital started flowing the amount of talent coming into the space is flowing. I think um the awareness from the customer's perspective of what is going to have to happen and just the readiness there and I've watched a lot of people think about the different business models and sort of explore things and I took the time to sort of really think hard about that and you know what is the business model that I really believe in

that's going to make the unit economics work that's going to make a durable business and all of those things have aligned um including backing from from Toyota and our other core strategics and this is the moment Does the business model actually matter that much? Because we've talked to people who are saying, "I'm going to build a robot and sell it. It's going to be very expensive." Others say, "We're going to uh, you know, finance it. It's going to be a subscription plan. We're going to sell the work." Uh, at the same time, yes, to a to a manufacturer who's buying a robot, a million dollar purchase can be expensive, but they have access to debt lines. They can finance these things on their side. And so uh when you say business model, is this just financial innovation sliding around the payments plan or is there more to it than that?

No, no. I think um I mean the hardware cost is expensive. The AI training costs are expensive when you until you've advertised it across a large fleet. So everything is kind of painful and expensive in the in the in the sort of small quantities.

That's actually one of the reasons why we focused on manufacturing. I think you want to find tasks that are super high utilization, right? You want the robot to be running three shifts if you can, right? Um you want to all all week long, right? You want to find places where there's a high um value of the of the work that's being done and there's a really good match for that in manufacturing.

And then as the economics play out, the unit economics become very favorable because you're training a model once and deploying it across a huge fleet and all all the things sort of improve with scale. The bomb cost of the robot goes down. Yeah,

but how do you get there from here? Right, I think you have to be thoughtful to make a business that can actually make money. Is the recent story of the the most recent robotics boom driven more by non-deterministic software generative AI unlocking the ability to do more with the physical designs that we have or or is there also an acceleration in the power and efficiency and capability of motors and actuators and robotic arms and the actual hardware side of the business because it feels like the really unique thing that everyone's like drawn to every moment is the the software side, the the generative AI, the ability to deal with uh never-beforeseen scenarios essentially.

Yeah. And it's and it's everyday people or people every person in the tech industry having like a magical moment with an AI model in the workplace and just thinking like, wow, this seems a lot more possible now to do something in the physical world. I mean, there's no question that the AI was the unlock. And it's it's not it's not just like making an MCP entry point for your existing robot API. It's actually we've dug down deep into the stack and used generative models to to command robot low-level behaviors in ways that make them much more dextrous. There's that's no question that that is the big thing.

But along the way, the hardware has gotten so much better. And it's not just pointing to one actuator. Of course there we've had improvements in actuators uh and batteries and all the other but it's the entire supply chain like the whole ecosystem has has put us in a position where you can start a robotics company. We've got a robot that we've built you know we started the company in January. We've got a brand new robot that was a twinkle in my hardware lead's eye in January and now it's you know it's it's out.

Seems like it's walking around behind you.

Yeah. Rolling around behind you.

We have so many robots running around.

The frosted glass is a real tease. I got to say, you got to get clear glass next time or at least electrochromatic so you can turn it off when you're on an interview,

but it's exciting progress.

How much uh how much did you raise?

Tell us.

Yeah, 300 million. And that's the number we wanted. Yeah. Get going for that. Awesome.

And thank you for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Fantastic rest.

Congratulations on the launch and we'll talk to you soon.

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