The Pittsburgh based startup pivoted from kids toys to inventory robots. Now they’re monitoring store shelves in 50 Walmart locations.
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Managing on shelf inventory is really Hard because of the flow of product that Volume makes it difficult to make sure a Product is on the Shelf right on time For the shopper to find it we’re Essentially giving visibility to the Stores telling them what is the ground Truth Where are the products are they stocked Are they in the right location is the Price right are the roads doing anything That a human employee couldn’t do it’s Much more minut in its analysis so what We do is robots don’t have any hands who Are not actually restocking shelves but What we do very well is we automate the Data collection and analysis so we have A bunch of 3d cameras that we point at The shelf and as the robot rolls down The aisle we capture the details of the Shelf enough every product how does this Data come back to the employee it tells Them what problems they want to fix and In what order so when the shift starts You come in and you have the entire Store analyzed you have the problems in Ranked order and you can hit them in That order Which maximizes your efficiency so You’ve had the underlying technology you Had the hardware and software AI things Like that but you had to build a custom Robot specifically for Walmart’s needs Yes we had the building blocks but you
Have to put them all together and that Tells you the baseline and then you Figure out what you cannot do with the Building blocks and then you have to go And invent them so we did that and That’s why it took us what six years now Working on it we actually naively Thought it was cameras on wheels how Difficult could that be maybe in nine Months we could deploy it and here we Are continuing to peel that onion I look At a company like yours and Amazon robot Exclusive mind right eh Sure yes you have Kiva Tiber ad building This company a giant retailer approaches Them starts using their stuff He eventually acquires them and turns it Into Amazon robotics did a deal like That not necessarily make sense for your Company was is Walmart not in the Business of buying technology companies Right now I think that’s I have to leave That to to Walmart to answer If we were to guide our own destiny if We continued to be successful doing that What we would like to do is serve the Entire industry because fundamentally The problem we’re solving which is lack Of visibility of what’s on the shelf is Universal the entire world has the same Problem and nobody has a solution and For large stores the best solution is a Combination of robots and AI and so what We want to do is completely maximize the
Impact and help the industry as in General improve their efficiency and Improve the shopping experience [Music] You
