Coco Robotics CEO: 1,000 robots live in LA, 20,000 next-gen units planned for 2027, UK expansion via DoorDash/Deliveroo

Speaker 10: Gentlemen,

Speaker 2: thanks for having me. It's great to have you. How many of these robots you got these days?

Speaker 10: We got about a thousand of them, but we have our next robot coming out soon, so you'll start seeing those around LA. Have you guys gotten a delivery?

Speaker 2: Wait. Wait. I have never gotten a delivery from a delivery robot. I see them all the time in Los Angeles that I know of. Can can the robots release the item

Speaker 1: autonomously? We don't know that that Coco's not live testing humanoid form factors with, you know, rubber masks that that make them. Potentially. We don't know. We don't know. That's true. They haven't come out and said that they're not doing that. But the current the current system is if I were to get a delivery in a CocoRobot,

Speaker 10: I would go up to it and pull the bag of food out of the bucket. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, we gotta get you guys a delivery then. Let's do it. But, yeah, for anyone that doesn't know, I mean, this is this is what they look like. This is a miniature three d printed version of it. But Yeah. It's a purpose built robot, designed for, moving goods around our cities. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And you're expanding to The UK. How did that come together?

Speaker 10: Yeah. So we... Here in The US, we work with Uber Eats and and DoorDash. DoorDash had recently acquired Deliveroo, which is based over in London. Sure. And so we've been working with DoorDash for, I think, almost four years at this point. We have a really close partnership, and we wanted to bring it across the pond and bring it to London. And so we announced just the other week a kind of multi year bidirectionally exclusive partnership to bring POGOs all throughout The UK and bring it to some real scale.

Speaker 2: How do you how do you think about... Or how is... How are these sidewalk robots different from the delivery network that you might see on DoorDash with people in cars? Like, is there a specific robot assigned to an individual restaurant because they're just going back and forth, or is it more like a fleet, a network that's driving around and it might stop by any random,

Speaker 10: restaurant, and the restaurant just has to sort of see the robot and say, oh, I should put this there. How does that work? Yeah. They're... So they're shared. So they'll... We'll get offers from the different platforms. We also work directly with some retailers. Mhmm. So we get a bunch of offers coming to our system, and then the robot will, you know, go somewhere to pick up an order, deliver it to the customer, and then go on to pick up the next one. So just in LA, I mean, we have probably a few thousand merchants across grocery, food, retail

Speaker 2: Yeah. That use the robots. Has there been any movement on getting the restaurants to help do some of the charging and some of the infrastructure sort of, like, use their back rooms for space, or do you have to do sort of what Lime and and, Bird did where you have trucks driving around servicing things? Like, what's been the solution there?

Speaker 10: You had some mix. I mean, ideally, you don't want to be going around swapping batteries because it means you're, you know, doubling... At least doubling your battery CapEx. It takes forever to drive across a place like Los Angeles to manually swap the batteries, and there's not that many deliveries happening at four in the morning. Yeah. So ideally, they go back to merchants. The merchants plug them in, and then they take a few hours of downtime. Right? So you run them twenty hours a day, and then maybe you have four hours of downtime to do cleaning and charging. We do work with some of our merchants to do this. We work with a bunch of kinda ghost kitchen companies that also are a great fit at actually charging these and helping us do some of the maintenance. And then some of our big retail partners, they have a bunch of space. They might have twenty four seven staffing Mhmm. In which case, we can kinda work with them to drive some incremental revenue back to their store in exchange for doing some of the fleet management. So you'll never have a 100% in any one of these categories, but the idea is to kinda work with our partners to reduce the overall cost of operating the fleet.

Speaker 1: What's the bottleneck to going from a thousand active robots? Sounds like this new in The UK will will increase that. But how how do you go to a million? Like, what what are the kind of things that need to happen?

Speaker 10: Yeah. So, you know, we're gonna bring... Coke is in about 10 cities today across The US and and Europe, and next year, we should be in between 40 to 50 cities across even more continents. And, you know, the first step is regulatory. You know, you need to create new policy for this. This is the new class of of thing. It's not a vehicle. It's not a person. It's it's a robot. And so you need to define laws around how the robots operate in our cities. So you work with different either national transportation agencies or at the state level or at the city level, depending on where we're going, introduce policy, and then ramping up manufacturing of our of our new robots. So this is Coco two. It's the next gen robot that you'll start seeing rolling around the cities in the coming weeks. So we're planning on making about 20,000 of those for 2027. Mhmm. So you'll see a pretty large step up in the fleet size across a lot of new a lot of new territories, and then the path to a million feels pretty inevitable from there. Mean, I you look like, you know, a platform like DoorDash probably has 10,000,000 drivers or something like that working working on the platform in The US, and the volumes on these platforms is still growing 20 to 30% a year. So you just compound this out. I mean, look at the at the end of the next decade, right, at the end of this... In the next ten years, you're gonna have you're gonna have to have, you know, 50% of The US working population, you know, driving for these platforms. So you you need to find a way of increasing supply without getting human drivers because you're just gonna run out of people.

Speaker 2: Awesome. A lot of people in tech are worried about x risk these days. Hypothetically, where's the vulnerable point if I need to disable this with, like, a five five six round? Where would I shoot it? Can't tell you that, though, but I Oh, wow. He's on the side of the robots. This guy's traitor to humanity. Crazy.

Speaker 10: It... What's funny is that You need, like, a dead man switch. Okay. Let me test it out, bro. Send the delivery over. Send it over. You wanna test it out. Japan. Sick. In Japan, you actually have to have a big red kill switch button on the robot. Oh, okay. Which I feel like would uniquely only work in Japan. Yeah. Because otherwise, in the back emergency. Of Of course. But separately,

Speaker 2: jokes aside, I I have no doubt that, that you are feeling the benefits of general model progress and AI progress. Like, just take an image, identify if there's someone there, if you can go straight on this road. All that's probably happening. But what do evals, what do benchmarks actually look like? What metrics are you measuring, and what are you seeing in those? Like, how do you know that the latest iteration of your software, of your AI stack is actually improving the experience? It feels like we sort of feel the failure mode. Like, the hallucination is like the viral video on Instagram of the cocoa robot getting stuck on the curb. But how are you measuring that? What's progress been like?

Speaker 10: Yeah. Well, it's it's interesting because I think in robotics, I mean, you see a lot of demos of folding clothes. And then in the self driving car world, you have a lot of road driving. Right? Yeah. In a very rule based environment. Yeah. The interesting thing about city sidewalks is they're the most complex, Yeah. Dynamic not rule based environment in the world, and every city is different. Yeah. Right? Navigating Downtown LA is is is is unique and different than Chicago, which is very different than Finland, which is very different than parts of Asia. And so you have different kind of social norms and behaviors. And so the robot actually needs to learn how to be a great, you know, user of the shared space with the public. It has to be a great sidewalk user. But we also need to get from point a to point b very quickly. So we can't spend a lot of time stopping. So there's this really complex kind of social navigational problem that we have to get very good at. So I think we have, you know, we have millions of hours and millions of miles of driving in these sort of environments, you know, snows, sun, you know, weekend nightlife, all these different sorts of environments. So we probably have one of the largest datasets of this sort of data, and and that's used to train all of our models. But then we've actually open sourced and published some really interesting benchmarks, because I think as these models progress, I think some of these big labs might want to be testing, hey, how did their model actually do at navigating the the public realm? How do we actually do it navigating, you know, a Downtown Chicago sidewalk? Yeah. And we actually have some benchmarks we've created from these different environments

Speaker 1: that we've published, and I think that will be helpful to the robotics industry in general. Very cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordy, sorry. Do you have any Yeah. Excited to see more of these around. It's it's an interesting thing. Like, you got it... You wanna... As a business, you wanna scale quickly. But I think, like, the the lesson from Flock is that, like, individual consumers have so much power Sure. Over over, like what's allowed Yeah. To operate in their area. And I think that, making sure that, you know, friendly robots are are never annoying is has to be like number one priority. And and that's such a hard problem versus what you were talking about with like on the roads. It's like we have established laws. When the light's green, go. Yeah. Oftentimes if I'm behind John, I have to honk after the light goes green. It's not getting any greener, buddy. But anyways, very difficult problem. And, yeah, I wanna see the Coco robot in Japan. I promise not to touch the big red button. Yeah. I I can I can be trusted? I

Speaker 2: imagine you hiring a couple of these just to patrol the property. This feels like an intermediary. If you if you don't wanna go robot dog patrol and humanoids aren't working yet, just having a a fleet of Coco's circling the property at all times, that's security. I like it. Guys, how do we get some lunch orders going to the office, going to the studio? Well, we'll coordinate. Nick will text you right now. We'll figure it out. We'll Yeah. We'll do it. We'll get our lunch delivered with Coco. Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to hang out. Thanks, guys. Congrats on the rest day. Of See you. We do have the phone toss replay live on TVPN ready. Let's see it in action. Jordy Can we get a little zoom in? Jordy

Speaker 1: Bone. Oh, that that... But I really wanna see Tyler's. Held up well. Because Tyler was Tyler comes in. Was bolder because he thought I was gonna catch him. Yeah. What's Let's zoom in. Let's zoom in. Okay. Got a little box. Let's see what's happening. Can we see this? Throws it. Oh,

Speaker 4: gets out of the way. Yeah. When Jordy moves back.