Most robotics companies are trying to perfect manipulation and locomotion before they deploy. That forces them to overcome a brutal reliability cliff before they can scale. We believe that’s a strategic error. Start with perception. Collapse deployment cost. Capture territory. Enable co-embodiment.

Today, it takes a few minutes to publish a new app or website online. People who buy a phone hardware expect it to run various software programs solving different tasks each. We often take for granted the complexity behind mobile operating systems that makes the flow of software between the developers and end users seamless. This is not the case for robotics.

Historically, robots were highly specialized pieces of equipment, required specialists to install and calibrate, and often programmed for a single task. Enter 2026, the hardware costs are going down, for some manufacturers starting as low as 1000 USD. Thousands of startups are building software for these robots but most of them hit a brick wall when it comes to distributing, maintaining and upgrading.

Why robots in retail?

Auki found a unique opportunity with Cactus and supermarkets that allows the deployment of thousands of robots within the next couple of years. A simple "camera on the wheels" robot is low-cost and low-risk to deploy, yet it provides high value by capturing 24/7 what the store actually looks like. Supermarkets also provide a unique distribution pipeline because of the central warehouses and the trucks going back and forth to the stores every day. So when it comes to replacing and repairing robots, setting up a workshop near one of these warehouses can provide under 24-hour support for hundreds of locations.

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More tasks for the same robot

Turns out it's not only the supermarket managers and owners that want to have eyes in the store. Brand owners, like Coca Cola, want to know what their designated section looks like in the store and how closely it matches the desired specification. Currently this job is done by a human, driving from one store to another and taking pictures and videos of the Coca Cola isles. Instead a much lower cost solution is to rent a robot that's already in the store, ask it to drive up to the Coca Cola isle and capture its current state.

This is exactly what CTRL+R specializes in.

Partnership with CTRL+R

CTRL+R is making robot operations easy. They provide a unified interface for full robotic control, designed to be intuitive for first-time operators, yet powerful and customizable for advanced robotics teams managing diverse fleets.

For robotics teams: CTRL+R is a one-stop shop to operate, manage, and monitor the entire robot fleet. No more building in-house software or switching between softwares - CTRL+R has everything baked in to help your fleet scale as the company grows.

For retail, construction, and more: CTRL+R gives teams real-time visibility into physical operations, helping them monitor site conditions, verify task execution, and extract data-driven insights from anywhere.

Together we are looking to provide a platform for remote specialists to visit and inspect hundreds of locations per day without the need to spend hours and hours to drive there.

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About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: a way for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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