Scaling to $20M ARR, Chained AI, and the New Protocol Paradigm

Coming to you from San Francisco, this week's community update dives deep into our accelerating enterprise retail pilots, major upgrades to our spatial AI logic, and the evolution of the Auki protocol.

We also have an important security notice: our old vanity Discord URL was hijacked by malicious actors this weekend. Please ensure you are only using our official link to join the community.

Enterprise Pilots and Becoming the Source of Truth

Our go-to-market strategy in retail is hitting terminal velocity. We are currently rolling out a massive pilot in Sweden and Norway with a $10 billion retailer that operates over 2,000 locations.

Meanwhile, our existing largest customer in Sweden continues to expand their use of Cactus. In fact, our Fortune 500 US pilot customer is flying to Sweden with us to see that live deployment in person.

The most important milestone with our largest customer is that Auki has officially become the upstream spatial source of truth for their legacy enterprise systems. Previously, these multi-billion dollar systems relied on hand-drawn, idealized planograms from headquarters to issue semantic directions (e.g., "walk forward, turn left"). Now, those systems ingest real-world, AI-generated spatial data directly from Auki.

Because of this deep, structural integration, our path to profitability is clear. As Nils stated: "It's looking like we'll be profitable very, very soon and could potentially, just on Cactus without the robots or glasses, land somewhere between $10 and $20 million ARR by summer."

The Cactus LLM and Chained AI Verification

On the software front, our internal demo days continue to showcase rapid advancements in our perception stack.

• The Cactus LLM: We demoed our conversational AI copilot that possesses absolute context of the store. If a customer asks, "What goes well with chicken?", the AI doesn't hallucinate a generic response—it actively cross-references live inventory and recommends a specific SKU that is currently on the shelf, then guides the user to it.
• Chained AI for Empty Shelves: Empty shelf detection models are notorious for false positives, which are expensive for retailers. We are mitigating this by chaining AIs together: one AI identifies an empty shelf, and a second AI acts as an auditor to reason through edge cases and check the first model's homework.
• App-Free Android Navigation: We announced that app-free AR navigation for Android will soon run natively directly inside the Chrome mobile browser.

New Hardware and Robot Soccer in Hong Kong

The Level 10 lab in Hong Kong is expanding its hardware arsenal to support external developers, researchers, and university teams.

• Realman Wheeled Humanoid: Realman is generously sponsoring a robot for our lab so we can conduct end-to-end integration demos of our spatial software with their impressive manipulation stack.
• Six Booster K1 Robots: Thanks to a generous sponsorship, we are receiving six Booster K1 robots. We plan to host robot soccer and team sports tournaments, allowing local university researchers to use our spatial network to coordinate multi-robot fleets.
• Custom Auki Hardware: We have now received offers from three different Chinese OEMs to manufacture a custom Auki-specific robot equipped with our ideal sensor array. At current price points, this is becoming a very tempting opportunity.

The Protocol Paradigm

Finally, Nils touched on the evolution of the Auki protocol. In 2021, the prevailing thesis was that AR multiplayer gaming would drive spatial computing. The metaverse bubble popped, and we realized that simply networking devices wasn't enough—devices needed to share rich spatial context.

That realization birthed the real world web. Today, our protocol is no longer just a relay network; it is a pipeline consisting of Domain nodes, Reconstruction nodes, Spatial Compute nodes, and Motion nodes. By breaking down perception and positioning into specialized, decentralized compute tasks, we are making it orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to deploy robots in the physical world.

If you want to build physical AI applications, come hang out at the Hong Kong lab. And if you want to join our off-the-record weekly AMAs, connect with us safely on Discord.

Watch the whole update on X.

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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