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It's been two weeks since the last update — Nils spent one of those weekends flying to Europe and back in a single day to talk next steps with a customer about their robot deployment. The flavor of these last two weeks: robot deployments, at scale we haven't priced before.
This week, one of the world's largest retailers sent us a request for price for a "humble over 1,000 robot" deployment. In one go.
We're not going to speculate on the stream about who. But we're graduating in orders of magnitude.
We're actively integrating four robots right now:
Goal for the year remains 500 robots deployed by year-end. Still tough, still possible. The biggest external risk we're tracking is the war in Iran — supply chain disruption is starting to show up in conversations with retailers, and some are already signaling they may slow spending until they understand how their supply chains will reroute.
"We are quite literally talking to the biggest retailers in the world now about very, very large-scale deployments. And we're very proud of having put ourselves in this situation and built something that is so deployable."
We finally announced what we've been building with CTRL+R — making it possible for anyone to remotely teleoperate the robots we deploy. Mack Lorden, CTRL+R's founder, hopped on stream from Dubai. The origin story is that he DM'd Nils about robot teleop on the same day a major global brand reached out asking for a way to inspect retail shelves without the retailer having to share data off their servers.
The loophole: the data never has to hit the customer's servers — you just look through the robot's camera in real time. That sidesteps the red tape that normally kills brand-vs-retailer data sharing.
"As Auki is building the physical world for AI and robotics to see and interact with, Controller is allowing the robots to be in that world."
CTRL+R's first problem to solve is distance. Whether it's retail, hospitals, mining, farms — a site manager no longer has to be physically there. The second problem is making the robot's presence better than a human's: scanning shelves, measuring construction progress week-over-week, surfacing analytics from vision.
Next week on the community update, you'll be able to sign into CTRL+R and drive a robot around our Hong Kong lab. Mack is also working on a simulation environment for people whose company robots aren't allowed to run third-party software.
While Nils was in Europe, we learned a new use case for teleop that we hadn't priced in. One European customer runs nearly a hundred unmanned 24/7 stores in rural areas — too small to staff. They want to put robots in those stores this year for all the usual reasons (shelf scanning, inventory), but also to let staff and the security company remotely sign into the robot when something needs investigating.
The most extreme location is 14 hours by car from the central warehouse. Driving out to investigate is unworkable. Signing into a robot is.
This is a great example of co-embodiment paying for itself: same hardware, multiple operators, multiple use cases, multiple revenue streams.
Johannes flagged a development from a recent industry event. ESL (electronic shelf label) manufacturers have been struggling with innovation, and after Johannes pushed them on the problems robots have reading their displays — glare from plastic chief among them — multiple of the largest ESL companies are now in his inbox. They're interested in glare-reduced ESLs and (we'll be careful here) potentially adding markers that let robots and phones detect ESL contents from a distance, much faster.
This means robots can move through a store faster while still capturing accurate shelf data. ESL companies suddenly have a strong incentive to make their products robot-friendly.
(Casualty report: one Booster arm joint sustained injuries during today's stream. Not the first. Probably won't be the last.)
Two jobs left, in Nils's framing: building and selling. If you want in:
Watch the whole update on X: pt 1, pt 2 (CTRL+R fireside), pt 3 (lab hangout).
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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