Robots printing living tissue plus the next Product to Prototype workshop
Plus more stories of hardware startup failures, and all the latest news in robots and startups.
Why traction tops funding
The founders of Wattage have shared a very honest evaluation of the mistakes they made with their early stage hardware startup in the Medium post, “Well, we failed”.
Wattage wanted to make it so creating and selling hardware was as easy as writing and publishing a blog post. You shouldn’t need to be an electrical engineer or an industrial designer to create electronic devices. Nor should you have to worry about supply chain or distribution if you wanted to sell them.
Being a hardware company, we focused on building prototypes to validate that our vision was technically feasible. In retrospect, this was a mistake. Instead, we should have released something far more lightweight, and as quickly as possible. Our efforts should have been focused on validating interest in our product and generating traction. We did realize this, and we were moving to launch a beta as a means of validating interest. The problem is we realized too late, and ultimately didn’t want to launch a beta that we couldn’t afford to support.
There’s a lot more good detail in the full post (and you can still read it in spite of Medium covering 2/3rds of the screen with paywall prompts).
BTW. Their pitch deck was very good. It just didn’t have the needed details.
Meanwhile Frontier Bio has come along way on the path to artificial organs
Frontier Bio is an amazing hardware/robotics startup that I’ve been following since early days at Circuit Launch. They are also the reason that Circuit Launch includes bio labs as well as hardware prototyping and manufacturing equipment. Frontier Bio has traction and is the most advanced living tissue ‘printer’ out there.
Traction
We've had the pleasure of working with some big names in the industry like Mayo Clinic and Intuitive Surgical. We've worked with many other organizations including government, medical device companies, Universities, and startups. Our sales have reached $5.2M.
In short
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From Prototype to Product
A half day workshop on manufacturing for robotics and deep tech startups from IEEE RAS and Entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley Robotics and Circuit Launch, at the new Circuit Launch location in Mountain View, 599 Fairchild Drive.
Sign up now to speak with mentors in the manufacturing process, plus a few for the investor pitch side of things too. :)
Humanoids Summit - MC'd by Evan Ackerman and Andra Keay
Silicon Valley Robotics is proud to be the strategic advisor for the first Humanoids Summit, Dec 11th and 12th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
The first speakers to be announced include Jonathan Hurst from Agility Robotics. You’ll also meed 1X, Apptronik, Kind Humanoids, Engineered Arts, Enchanted Tools and Hanson Robotics, with MCs Evan Ackerman and Andra Keay. And we’re just getting started.
The Summit has expanded to three tracks in order to accommodate more stellar speakers and exhibitors, and if you’re a Silicon Valley Robotics member you get a great discount on exhibiting and attending.
SVR Investor Summit:
ALL registrations will also forward to Jan 30th 2025. Please ignore the accepted/pending/notaccepted as we update Luma.
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Robot News
Watch a robot operate on a pork loin - Popular Science
J&J MedTech wins IDE for Ottava to greenlight trials for surgical robot - Medical Device Network
EELS: AI-enabled snake robots and the search for life on Enceladus - Planetary Society
GITAI gets funds to develop in-orbit robotic servicer - SpaceNews
Kibo Robot Programming Challenge Breaks New Ground in Robotics - NASA
SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son Shares His Vision for AI-Enabled Robots - Bloomberg
AI Startup Hugging Face is Building Small LMs for ‘Next Stage Robotics’ - EMERGE
Meet The Only Humanoid Autonomous Robot Actually Working In Warehouses Today - Forbes
A robot in every factory? - DC Velocity
Inside Spirit AI’s quest to deploy humanoid robots in automotive factories - KrAsia
Fieldwork Robotics partners with Burro to help with raspberry harvesting - The Robot Report
Agility Robotics to provide walking robots for German car company - DC Velocity
FIX 2024: Jimbo Robotics’ affordable transport robots enhance workplace efficiency - ET Manufacturing
Moxi reaches milestone of 100,000 autonomous elevator rides in hospitals - The Robot Report
Chinese autonomous driving startup Pony.ai seeks up to $224M in US IPO - TechCrunch
Alphabet’s Waymo opens autonomous ride-hailing service to all in Los Angeles - Reuters
What Happens When Robots Don’t Need Us? - Bloomberg
A New Broadyway Musical Asks Can Robots Fall in Love? - NYTimes
NIST seeking comments for the NSSCET Implementation Roadmap (National Standards Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technology - NIST
IEEE Spectrum
Robot Events
The local events I’m going to be at…
And some more robotics conferences (and I’ll see you at CSAIL, BARS, ROSCon, Masters&Robots, ICSR and more tbd):
2025