Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yeah. When you think about the size of a vehicle relative to the thing it's carrying, if you order from DoorDash, the discrepancy is huge. Couple ton vehicle and you've got a burrito. When you move delivery underground, it's not just greener and that it's fully electric. You're also just transporting less mass and so it's more efficient for that energy you're using. But there's this third benefit that is kind of hard to grasp until you go and see it in person, which is it's invisible. You cannot see that it's there. And I think there's something magical to making our cities, honestly, better places to live.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello everyone, and welcome to the robot Industry podcast. We're glad you're here and thank you for subscribing. Before we get to our episode today, I wanted to let you know about a new podcast that I'm starting called Automation Matters. It's about the front end of the automation business and whether you're a builder, distributor, or robot. OEM, this is for you. New podcast is about sales, marketing, business development, strategy, and much, much more. And I'm excited to present to you as well, automation matters, but more on that later. Today's episode is a sleeper. This took me a couple of days to think about how this new idea, this new business, can change lives and like everyone's lives. And whether you need an emergency prescription late at night, a spice from a grocery store, or a part for your car, or a few diapers for your kidde, this new idea is very, very exciting. And so my guest today is Canon Reeves from Pipedream. And this episode is about unprecedented convenience. And it's a really big idea. It's a mashup of instant super convenience, getting trucks off the road and making life better, and about disrupting. So, Canon, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Jen.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: So tell us about Pipedream and how you had this idea.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Yeah. At Pipe dream, we are building underground delivery to enable a future that we call hyper logistics, which is something you kind of touched on. But the idea is that there's this future state in our cities where we can send or receive anything in under ten minutes in our cities. And we think this is going to be huge. We think it's where things are going to end up no matter what. Eventually, we just think that pipe dream and specifically using underground tunnels is the way to get there.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: So when you and I first had the discussion about coming on the podcast, I was like, yeah, okay, so this is kind of an interesting idea. And then I started thinking about it, and that's why I mentioned it's a sleeper. It's a term we, you have in Canada. You probably have it, too, that you have to sleep on this a little bit. You go, what? You mean I could have a delivery delivered to my home without a truck? Like securely, like, this just ticks so many of the boxes. And this is underground. You mentioned this. It goes in a pipe. It's really, really fast. So tell us a little bit about the business.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. You know, the idea came from my co founder, Garrett.
And when you think about how our cities are laid out and how we get things now, you know, be it water or sewage or Internet, it's all coming underground. And I think it's awesome because it's invisible and it just works on our society. We felt like delivery was eventually going to be autonomous. It doesn't really make sense for people to be driving these massive cars and trucks around our roads just to get us our things. And we're only ordering more and more and more things. So we looked at how cities and societies have done this for years and years and years and decided, well, why can't we just do that now? So what we do is we take standard, off the shelf utility pipes and we place smart robots inside of them. And so we lay this kind of passive rail throughout these pipes. We lay all the pipes ourselves. And, yeah, we make it really easy to get things from a to b. It's basically free. Once you create that pipe, that environment, it's very fast. It's safe because it's an enclosed environment and it gets cars off the road.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: I keep thinking about the massive amounts of cardboard and the massive amounts of fuel and people doing like, silly things, like delivering stuff to people's homes. It's just so, so exciting. So you've proven this right already. Like, you're actually got test piloting going on in different cities in the food industry. And you and I talked, I think, about a fast food restaurant, which was a really interesting idea, and about maybe you can expand on that.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. You know, we named the company pipe dream for a reason. It is pretty far out there. And like you said, it is a sleeper. You kind of have to think about it. There's no easy way to create a utility. All utilities were at some point a retrofit, and there's no easy path. It is hard. And so what we did as a company is we said, well, what are ways for us to basically, like, take risk off the table? And make it easier for this to scale and grow. So there's two kind of visions and sides of the business. One is this long term vision where there's a pipe going directly into your house and you've got sort of magic drawer where anything you want is a matter of minutes away and you've got this robot that will visit to you that will take a long time to build towards. So what we're starting with is what we call instant pickup. And it's kind of like baked tubes, but for food and groceries. And so we're working with mastery restaurants and grocers to take their current pickup experience, which is you pull up, you order, you pull up and somebody walks out your order to you. We're taking that and turning it sort of like a bank tube where there's a robot that delivers that underground. And by doing that, we can get all of these sort of supply side nodes that eventually go into this larger network. So we've got that side of the business and then we've got the side that's actually going through the city. And to validate and to prove that we could do that, we partner with the city of Peachtree corners in Georgia, just outside of Atlanta, to do our first pilot of this. And so we laid about a mile of track between a retail center and an office space along public right of way through an active road. Yeah, we laid that pipe and now we've got a robot that can send stuff from either side. So we've kind of validated that side of this.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: And that's very exciting, the whole fact that, yeah, we have to have a demo somewhere and let's actually watch this thing as it grows. So that's really, really exciting. What other real life applications are you working on?
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah, the other one we're working on is so we've got instant pickup in grocery and the fast food space. We're working on a concept that we call middle mile, which is this idea that it's going to take a long time to retrofit this through a city. And so what is a way that we could add value sooner? And the way that we're thinking right now and that we're working towards is connecting up areas and districts of a city. And so you still are integrated directly with the supply nodes. But what if you could get your groceries just by driving to the end of your neighborhood? Or on the flip side of that, what if you want those groceries delivered to you and a gig driver can go from that point just outside your neighborhood to your home and so by reducing the distance between you and this sort of, like, magic portal, we call them portals, we can just make delivery more efficient in its current state as we build this network further and further out.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: So tell us a little bit about the robot. So this robot fits in a tube, so it's not very tall.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Designing things to work in a pipe is a surprisingly interesting design constraint because everything we do is tote based. So we're kind of like a warehouse automation, like a shuttle based warehouse automation solution.
So you've got to get this tote, which is a square. You've got to fit it inside of a circle, which is the pipe. And then you got to find room for the robots in the edges. It trends to some interesting shapes in the robot. But what we've done is create robots that are of about as complicated as an electric skateboard, if you think about it. The robots just need to go forward, go backwards, or stop. There's not a lot of complexity. And because you are in this confined environment of the pipe, you don't need a lot of sensing or perception or even really that complicated of route planning. You're kind of on a track. So the robots trend very, very simple. And then the rail inside the pipe, we opted to go unpowered. It's just a passive rail that sits on the bottom of the pipe. Those pipes will last 100 years. They're designed to last a long time. We wanted to be able to swap out any of the rail or that infrastructure that we've created. So the robots in the rail all pretty dumb, and they just live inside of a pipe.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: And the robot just has to go forward and backwards, right?
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Yep, pretty fast, but just forward and backwards.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: And how is this greener and cheaper and kind of a more accessible solution?
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Yeah, when you think about the sort of, like, size of a vehicle relative to the thing it's carrying, if you order from Doordash, the discrepancy is huge. You're in a couple ton vehicle, and you've got a burrito. But when you move delivery underground, it's not just greener in that it's fully electric. You're also just transporting less mass, and so it's more efficient for that energy you're using. But there's this third benefit that is kind of hard to grasp until you go and see it in person, which is it's invisible. You cannot see that it's there. And I think there's something magical to making our cities honestly better places to live and reducing the number of vehicles on the road. Like nobody likes traffic. Nobody likes extra vehicles. And with this, you kind of move them just totally underground, and we no longer have to worry about traffic. You know, if you're driving your order to you and there's a backup, like, you get affected by that because it's all underground. In this closed ecosystem, we control all of the traffic, and so we can get your things to you very quickly.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: And this is kind of like this whole thing could make drones a little bit obsolescent. Right, for. So it's kind of a leapfrogging technology, too.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Yeah, we definitely believe in a multimodal future where there's some places where it just doesn't make sense for us to get a pipe out there. And so we kind of see this future where we are actually handing off to drones autonomously and self driving cars. So if you imagine a grocery store that has one of our instant pickup nodes in it so people, customers can order and go pick up their groceries very quickly, but also it has a drone hub connected to it. The workers in the back of house never have to interface with that drone. They never have to think about that, and they never have to worry about where does that drone go? In the parking lot. We get to handle all of that. And so even if there's places where there's certain areas of demand that we can't physically get to, we can support this sort of autonomous future where drones work together with us.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: And so how do you demo your system to potential clients? I was going to ask you about who your clients are in a minute because I think that's going to be exciting.
Do you take them to your system?
[00:09:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a mix. We've got the site near Atlanta, so we'll fly people out to Atlanta and show them there. We also got a warehouse next door and built out a demo system that's sort of like above ground. It's kind of fun because the base of the system is like the pipes, which are a few feet underground. And so to demo this above ground, you have to create these stages that are like 6ft off the ground, which would normally be kind of floor level. So it's kind of fun. When you try to build this above ground, you end up making a bunch of really tall stages. Yeah, it's great to bring people. And the overwhelming reaction when we bring customers here is it's way simpler than I thought. And as an engineer, that's the best thing you can ever hear because it takes so much more work to create something that is simple than it is to make something complex. When a customer comes who's not technical and walks away thinking that this is simple to us, that's perfect, because for this to be a utility, it has to be so simple, it has to be so robust and so, yeah, we turn towards that simplicity and love bringing customers out. It's like the best part of my job, for sure.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: So who are your first customers? And maybe we should think about who are your first industry customers. So fast food certainly comes to mind.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Unfortunately, I can't name names today, which is a bummer. I cannot wait until the day where we can. But the industries we're working with are fast food or quick serve restaurants and then grocers. And there's a few other interesting use cases we've explored, but those are kind of the main focus for us right now.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: So you must have a lot of partners too, because whenever you're, I think in this kind of situation, you have partners and you have customers. And so who are some of those partners?
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Yeah, not any that I can, like, really name, but tell me maybe kind.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Of who they are. Like, would they be developers and would they be cities or, you know, kind of like in general without specific?
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. So definitely cities. And Peachtree corners, Georgia has been a huge partner for us. Brandon, who runs their sort of innovation lab, was just so crucial to us to understand, like, what is this, like, to actually interface with the city and put in in a way that doesn't disrupt the citizens and their daily lives. But they also just give us advice as we look at expanding to other cities and knowing what those other cities look for. We've got construction companies that are partners with us that are super helpful with just like looking at different quotes and understanding how can we make this system easier to build. We've got partners on the manufacturing side that are helping us, like, basically make better designs. A lot of our stuff is sheet metal. We try to make stuff very, very quickly. And so that trends like laser cut and bent things.
Yeah, we've got partners kind of as you get into the restaurant space, you work with companies that focus on the cleanliness. We worked with like Ecolab and HME to handle the comms. And so there's been a number of people that just kind of come in and play, just help us in these things. But to us, the biggest is working with our customers. They're our biggest partners through and through because they understand their business so well. And what we do when we approach an industry in a market is we start by selling, we go and we find those people who can believe in this concept before a lot of the work has been done, and we work with them together to create a solution that's more tailored to their needs. I would say our customers are our biggest partners, and I think it's a really easy thing to miss. As a robotics company, it's very easy to wait until it's done to go sell it and show the world. But we've found that the inverse approach is the most valuable in terms of making sure you're building the right thing, and it pushes you to build faster because you've got a customer that wants that thing now.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. And are there any bullseye customers that you are kind of looking for? If you wave a magic wand, you could say, you know, who we really need? Is what you really need the post office or somebody like that.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Yeah, we're in a really fun spot where those customers were talking with them, so I can't name any names of even the ones we want, but we've been very proactive about going and building those relationships, and it helps to have an idea that is kind of far out there and fun to root for. There's a million reasons why this is going to be hard and things that could keep this from working. But we've found people within our customers organizations that like to believe in these kinds of things, and it's fun to them to go, for them to go and work and help us imagine how to make this a reality.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: You know, these are interesting times. And, I mean, I was, a few years ago, we went to the city of Bruges in Belgium, and they have a pipeline for beer, and they all share it. And so, you know, this is not super. This is really interesting, but it's not super out of the ordinary. Right. People have done this before where they've taken infrastructure and shared it.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the interesting thing about infrastructure, is there's a known price to install it. And so from there, it's an equation of how much volume and how valuable is that thing that I want to send through it. And then once you have those pieces, it's like, all right, this becomes a financial thing, really, and those can be worked out, so you can solve and deliver all kinds of things.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: So tell me also about your big news. And you've got, like, $13 million worth of big news, and what's this going to do for your company?
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. We just announced a seed round led by Starship Ventures, Mylan, and Cortado Ventures.
It is going to allow us to really accelerate into these opportunities with customers that we've kind of got at our plate. And we basically, as you can imagine, have a lot of engineering to do less. So on the underground system. The underground system. Our approach to development is to make everything very modular. And so the underground system works for all of our customer facing products just the same. But on the above ground side, we create these portals, which are places like automated kiosk for people to get their things. And so there's a lot of different ways that those look. So really what this round unlocks is more engineering to just go finish these portals, go execute on some pilots, and then also just more operations to help us service all of our customers and really go from this one test, mile long test track to a bunch of pilot networks and installs.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: So I guess you've got kind of everything you need now, right? You've got money, you've got interest, you've got clients, you've got partners.
What's your next big challenge? Is it attracting talent or is it just attracting attention?
[00:15:50] Speaker A: I think it really comes down to attracting talent and getting people who are just incredibly smart and great at what they do, but also great to work with and able to think high level about what is the technical challenge I'm solving. But also, how does this relate to our customer? We are a very small team and we, we very much believe in having a small team of extremely intelligent and capable engineers. We think that that is the winning strategy to move fast and stay lean as a startup. And so finding those engineers that fit well into that organization is one of the biggest bottlenecks and podcasts like this is great. I think if anybody out there is a smart engineer that wants to work on something that's hard that a lot of people have said is impossible, but we keep proving them wrong bit by bit.
Come join us.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: That's great. So thanks again, Canon, for coming on today. Is there anything that we forgot to talk about?
[00:16:40] Speaker A: I think if I could hamper on it one more time. I think if anybody out there is working on a hard startup or building anything difficult that requires deep technology in robotics, start with the customer. Start by building a really good relationship with your customer and forcing yourself out of the lab and build towards what they want.
It's painful at times. It's hard because you want the product to be done because you're working with a customer and they're excited about it. It will just create the right forcing functions in your business. And as a deep tech company, I think you really need that voice of the customer in there throughout the entire development process. It will make the end product just so much better.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: I'm a big believer in voice of customer. We do a lot of those projects here at customer attraction. So I totally that when you're not automating and inventing and remapping the world of robotics, what do you like to do? You have any hobbies?
[00:17:27] Speaker A: I do. I'm a person of extremes, and so when I pick up something, I want to get as good as I can at it. My two big hobbies are climbing mountains. I'm trying to climb all the 14 years in Colorado and knocked out the biggest mountain that I can in the lower 48, and always trying to climb a bigger mountain, but that requires a lot of travel. So when I'm not doing that, I've been picking up hockey. I moved to Austin two years ago and started playing, and I love it. It's like my favorite thing to do.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: And in case we didn't say this in the beginning, thank you for that. Are you based out of Austin, then?
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Yes, we're in Austin, Texas.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Excellent. It's a great place to be. Lots of smart people there, and lots of people that want to get engaged with very cool new startups. So that's wonderful. And how can people get a hold of you if they want to? Find out more about Pipedream.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Yeah, we're on Twitter very actively. That's kind of the stream of conscious from the company. We're putting a lot of stuff out, pipe dream labs and Twitter, but also our website is Pipedreamlabs Co. And if you go there, you can find all of our job postings and kind of more information about, yeah, what we're up to.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Great. And I'll put that in the show notes on the robot industry podcast. And so I want to thank you again for coming on today.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Sweet. Thank you so much, Jim.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Our sponsor for this episode is Earhart Automation Systems. Earhart builds and commissions turnkey solutions for their worldwide clients. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing, they understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing, and project management, delivering world class custom automation on time and on budget. Contact one of their sales engineers to see what Earhart can build for you. And they're hard to spell. They're Ehrhardt, and I'd like to acknowledge a three the association for advancing automation. They're the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. Visit automate.org to learn more. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the robot industry podcast. That means me. You can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. Today's podcast was produced by customer attraction Industrial Marketing. And I'd like to recognize Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, my business partner, Janet, and our sponsor, Earhart Automation Systems. And our new sponsor, anchor Danley. Thanks again, and be safe out there.
