Inspirations• Investment Thesis• The Future of Humanity• Venture Capital

The Robot Is the Easy Part 🤔

Cosmic Robotics got into Y Combinator’s summer batch. If the name is new to you: they build autonomous construction equipment, starting with robots that install utility-scale solar panels. Their first machine, the Cosmic 1A, is an eight-wheeled platform with a six-axis arm that lifts panels and sets them in place.
The company raised $4M led by Giant Ventures last year, and the founders are open about the long-term plan being construction on Mars!🔥

All of that is fun to write about. None of it is what I want to write about 😉

What I really liked is the software. Cosmic’s operators run their fleet through a platform called Constellation, a digital twin and robot management system designed by Hello Robo, a studio that does UX and brand design for robotics companies. Cosmic and Hello Robo shared a reel of the interface this week and I think it deserves more attention than a product video usually gets👇

When an operator opens the platform in the morning, the first thing on screen is a sentence. “Good morning, Joe,” followed by a short summary of what the fleet did overnight and what needs a decision today. Below that, a map of the site rendered as a digital twin, every row of panels marked by install status. One clear number for autonomous uptime, one for idle time. Statuses written in words a site supervisor actually uses: in progress, on track, ahead of schedule.

That sounds like a small thing?🤔 I’d argue it’s most of the game 🔥

Think about who actually uses this. The person managing a robot fleet on a solar site in Texas is a construction supervisor. They’ve run crews for fifteen years. They have not run robots. Autonomy asks them to trust a machine with work they used to watch happen with their own eyes, and that trust gets built or lost in the interface. If the dashboard reads like a debug console, the supervisor hovers over the robot all day and you’ve automated nothing.

I look at a lot of robotics decks. The pattern I see if the following: the hardware demo is polished, the CAD renders are gorgeous, and then the software screenshot appears and it’s grey tables and raw coordinates, clearly built by the same engineers who wrote the motion planning code, at the end, quickly.

Founders treat the operator interface as something to clean up after the robot works. I think that ordering is backwards.

The robot working and the customer believing the robot works are two separate problems, and the second one is where deployments stall.

There’s a harder-nosed reason to care too. That uptime number on the dashboard is the business. Cosmic claims its robots can roughly double daily install rates and cut labor costs in half. Whether a customer expands to the next site depends on whether they can watch that happen, day by day, in a form they trust enough to show their own boss. The interface is where the robot’s performance becomes visible, and visible performance is what sells robot number two 😌

Hello Robo is run by Shak Dzheyranov, ex-Nike, with a team pulled from Apple and Google. They’ve done this kind of work for Bedrock Robotics and Open Robotics as well. Their bet is that robotics companies will keep needing this layer and mostly can’t build it in-house. Based on what shows up in my inbox, they’re right!

Congrats to James Emerick and Lewis Jones on YC.