Quiet Inflection Points and Bigger Deals

A Month on the Road, and a Shift in the Air

This update comes from Hong Kong, where Nils is back home after a month bouncing between San Francisco and Singapore. It’s been meetings with:

• Potential customers
• Potential investors
• Robotics partners

Somewhere in the last few weeks, something subtle but important changed. We started getting more inbound from robotics companies—especially smaller teams that are already deploying cleaning, greeter, and utility robots. Nils has also gotten many new followers and DMs from people at NASA, NVIDIA, Meta, and others.

He notes, “I think we broke through a very significant robotics barrier sometime in the last couple of weeks.”

These teams see the Auki network as a way to deploy robots faster, at better margins, with less on-site pain. We’ll do a deeper robotics-focused breakdown in a longer update next Friday.

New Listings: PancakeSwap, Hydrex & Friends

On the token side, we expanded where people can trade and provide liquidity:

• We’re now live on PancakeSwap.
  • We moved a chunk of liquidity from Uniswap over to Pancake, so Uniswap TVL will look a bit lower.
  • PancakeSwap reached out to us (not the other way around) and is offering 30+ CAKE per day in emissions to LPs.
• We’ve also been added to Hydrex, a DEX/aggregator on Base.
• Add that to the earlier LCX listing, and that’s three new venues in the last couple of months: LCX, Hydrex, and PancakeSwap.

Enterprise Sales: 4x Per-Store Pricing

On the commercial front, Johannes (our head of sales) just locked in terms for a new enterprise deal:

• This retailer is similar in scale to our first major customer (10B+ annual revenue).
• They will be paying 4x more per store than that first big customer.
• The price point is roughly 2x what we expected we’d be able to charge by 2028.

The deal was delayed due to the sudden death of a counterpart on their side, so we paused to give them space. Now we’re back on track and preparing deployment.

This is early, but it’s strong validation for the value of the network and Cactus—and may force us to revise our long-term revenue projections upward.

Talking Accessibility and Robots With a Major Asian Government

We also had a very different kind of meeting: one of us sat down with representatives from the government of a major Asian country to talk about:

• Accessibility in the age of robots
• Blind navigation at city scale
• How the real world web can support both people and robots moving safely through urban spaces

This contact came via our friends at Zappar, who’ve been building blind navigation on top of Auki domains.

We’re now exploring:

• A pilot for a high-traffic tourist venue
• Long-term possibilities like humanoid robots that can push wheelchairs at major attractions

We think we could do that by the end of next year if there’s a client for it. If it moves forward, we’ll also use it as a friendly nudge with the Hong Kong government, who already know us but need a bit of competitive motivation to move faster.

Mika in Hong Kong: OneShot Copilot on Mentra Glasses

On the builder side, Mika—a long-time community member and grant recipient—is in Hong Kong for the month, working closely with us on OneShot, his AI copilot:

• Runs on Mentra smart glasses
• Uses the Auki network as its spatial backbone
• Aims to be a practical copilot for real-world tasks

Our goal: show a live demo of OneShot on Mentra glasses before the end of the month.

If you’re thinking about building co-pilots, robotics integrations, or new apps on top of the real world web, now is a very good time to talk to us.

What’s Next

Today’s update was intentionally short (and broadcast from a child’s bed, doubling as a temporary office). Next week we’re planning:

• A longer, more structured robotics deep-dive
• More detail on:
  • Which robotics companies are integrating
  • What exactly “breaking through the robotics barrier” looks like under the hood
  • How all of this ties back into our six-layer model and the network’s economics

Same time next Friday. Join us live in Discord if you want the off-stream AMA and the unrecorded bits.

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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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