Sramana Mitra: What happened with Cincinnati airport after the one-month pilot? You now have some money to fix the usability issues. What were the commercials on that?

Ritukar Vijay: We were focusing on Robotics-as-a-Service model. There’s a fixed subscription for each month. These robots will perform deliveries. There’s potential revenue share. There was a lot of thought process going on during that time.

The first thing that we did was to change the dynamics within the team since we were all engineers. We got an element of design and usability into the team. They can focus more on the humane side. That was the first change. Second was when the Airport came up with this proposition. In six to eight months, we came up with a commercial agreement with the airport that we were going to deploy these robots with these concessionaires.

Last Thanksgiving, we went live at the Cincinnati Airport. We were delivering goods from the TripAdvisor store. It’s still live. We had zero safety incidences. That became a case study in itself. We also got more feedback. Last August, we launched the current generation of robots which we call Autobot 2.0. That focused on a lot of regular problems like maneuverability.

Another problem was also accessibility. How can people with special needs access the packages? Also scalability. We were getting inquiries for outdoor deliveries as well. Since our core tech was working for both indoor and outdoor, we were game for it. If you have different versions, how can you make the robot cater to a retailer, an F&B, or e-commerce?

Scalability became one big question. We came up with this model where the robot stays the same. The cadence can be customized based on the requirements of the customer.

We were able to gather a lot of interest in the US, Europe, and Middle East. All this led to an institutional round which we raised last August. That was led by a Bangalore-based Deep Tech investor. That was followed with Kinetic Ventures, which was our initial investor, and a food tech investor based in New York. The whole strategy was to get validation and feedback, and repeat. This loop helped us to create better products. Our customers gained a lot of trust in us.

Sramana Mitra: You only had the Cincinnati Airport customer. How did the commercials of that one work out?

Ritukar Vijay: The airport didn’t pay us at that point in time because they wanted validation. We twisted the use case a little and did product sampling and branding for one of the customers, which is P&G. They have a travel-related product. They wanted to create awareness. We got a small check coming out that pilot.

Sramana Mitra: Where is that deployed?

Ritukar Vijay: That was at that airport. After the one-month food delivery pilot, we did the pilot with P&G.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of denomination are we talking?

Ritukar Vijay: It was close to $10,000.

Sramana Mitra: This is not your steady state use case though.

Ritukar Vijay: Right. We just wanted to pursue what we wanted to build.

Sramana Mitra: Your first set of friends and family came after this first MVP with a Cincinnati Airport assuming that airports was going to be your big use case.

Ritukar Vijay: Airport is one of our go-to-market strategies where we can learn more. That worked out exactly how we thought. As we were building up, we had hyper local deliveries.