Robots, Domains, and a Busy Week in San Francisco

Auki Sponsors San Francisco’s First “Real Steel” Fight

We kicked off from San Francisco, where rek.tv hosted a robot fight controlled through VR headsets. As the champion sponsor, we backed the blue Unitree G1, piloted by Justin Kan (Twitch co-founder). The red robot was controlled by UFC fighter Hyder Amil. These G1s aren’t standard models—Unitree actually made “fighting versions” with reinforced hips.

Plenty of robotics teams and investors are attending, so it’s been a strong networking moment ahead of the Series A.

Meetings With Geodnet and Hivemapper

While in town, we’re meeting with two key DePIN players:

• Geodnet — discussing deeper collaboration inside Intercognitive (Auki and Geodnet are founders of Intercognitive. We're working on shared standards.)
• Hivemapper — first in-person meeting, exploring whether their collected imagery could serve as inputs for visual positioning and whether they may join Intercognitive as well

Internal Progress: Multi-Level Domains

In this week’s internal demo day, Jason and JB showed the first working prototype of multiple coordinate systems inside a single domain. This unlocks:

• Multi-floor buildings
• Split-level spaces
• Complex retail venues
• Mixed indoor/outdoor transitions

It’s been one of the most requested features, and early screenshots are already rolling in.

New Robotics Teams Joining

Liza has been reaching out to robotics labs across Hong Kong and China, and we’re now onboarding several academic and industry teams who want to build on the real world web. Some of these came directly from the traction around our live humanoid navigation demos.

New U.S. Paid Pilot

A large U.S. retailer (not grocery) with thousands of locations is starting a paid pilot: $15,000 for three test stores. If results look good, the intent is to expand across their full footprint.

Series A: Why We’re Raising $75M

We’re now deep in conversations for a $75M Series A. Soft commitments: $10–20M so far. Use of proceeds:

• Acquire a key partner we would otherwise rev-share with
• Deploy ~500 humanoid robots by end of 2026
• Deploy ~5,000 smart glasses
• Expand the team and secure runway through end of 2028

The goal is to hit the operational proof points needed for a follow-on raise to deploy 10,000+ robots in 2027–28.

Nils is risk on. “If you’re not willing to risk losing five or ten million on hardware, you’re not really playing to win the robotics race.”

Some investors are asking whether we should use credit or a distribution partner for the robot fleet; discussions are ongoing, but our preference is to keep the robots directly on our balance sheet.

A Few Notes From the Q&A

• We finally secured auki.com (leased, not purchased).
• Lots of “robotics” projects are cold-DMing us for partnerships; we’re declining all that are vibes-only.
• OpenMind has not reached out; we’ll likely meet them at a Singapore side event.
• Opinions on Optimus/Figure came up; short version: Figure looks more serious this year, Optimus less relevant until they ship.
• Terrible crypto-robotics ideas seen this week: “Let your robot mine Bitcoin when idle.”

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Watch the whole update on X.

アウキ・ラボについて

Aukiはポーズメッシュという地球上、そしてその先の1000億の人々、デバイス、AIのための分散型機械認識ネットワークを構築しています。ポーズメッシュは、機械やAIが物理的世界を理解するために使用可能な、外部的かつ協調的な空間感覚です。

私たちの使命は、人々の相互認知能力、つまり私たちが互いに、そしてAIとともに考え、経験し、問題を解決する能力を向上させることです。人間の能力を拡大させる最も良い方法は、他者と協力することです。私たちは、意識を拡張するテクノロジーを構築し、コミュニケーションの摩擦を減らし、心の橋渡しをします。

ポーズメッシュについて

ポーズメッシュは、分散型で、ブロックチェーンベースの空間コンピューティングネットワークを動かすオープンソースのプロトコルです。

ポーズメッシュは、空間コンピューティングが協調的でプライバシーを保護する未来をもたらすよう設計されています。いかなる組織の監視能力も制限し、空間のプライベートな地図の自己所有権を奨励します。

分散化はまた、特に低レイテンシが重要な共同ARセッションにおいて、競争優位性を有します。ポスメッシュは分散化運動の次のステップであり、成長するテック大手のパワーに対抗するものです。

アウキ・ラボはポスメッシュにより、ポーズメッシュのソフトウェア・インフラの開発を託されました。