These robots could cut delivery costs by 80% | Next Unicorns

These robots could cut delivery costs by 80% | Next Unicorns This Week In Startups is made possible by: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Agree https://agree.com Today's show: *Cytronic built a robotics-first fulfillment network, packing and shipping orders for cents instead of dollars, from small, city-adjacent micro-warehouses. Alex chats with CEO and co-founder Kevin Gibbon about how he can build a fulfillment warehouse for $1.2 million, and why it costs Amazon 50M-100M. PLUS Eyebot delivers low-cost doctor-reviewed eyeglass prescriptions following 90-second vision tests, conducted in everyday kiosks. We asked CEO and co-founder Matthias Hofmann how he's trying to simplify vision care and caught up with his Walmart and Sam's Club pilot programs. Guests Kevin Gibbon on X: https://x.com/kevingibbon Cytronic: https://cytronic.ai/ Matthias Hofmann on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mchofmann/ Eyebot: https://www.eyebot.co/ Relevant Links Axios: Cytronic seed round: ****https://www.axios.com/pro/supply-chain-deals/2026/07/15/robotic-fulfillment-cytronic-13m Airhouse acquired by Syncware: https://www.airhouse.io/ Amazon News: 10 Years of Robotics: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/10-years-of-amazon-robotics-how-robots-help-sort-packages-move-product-and-improve-safety Serve Robotics: https://www.serverobotics.com/ Zipline: https://www.flyzipline.com TechCrunch: Manna plots major US expansion: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/08/autonomous-drone-delivery-startup-manna-plots-major-u-s-expansion/ TechCrunch: Eyebot Series A round: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/26/eyebot-gets-20m-series-a-to-boost-to-expand-eye-care-access/ CNET Eyebot coverage: https://www.cnet.com/health/medical/i-took-a-vision-test-in-90-seconds-with-a-robot-and-saw-the-future-of-vision-care/ Walmart & Sam's Club announcement: https://www.eyebot.co/resources/walmart-and-sams-club-pilot-fast-affordable-eyeglass-prescriptions-using-eyebots-technology/ Formlabs: https://formlabs.com/ Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses: https://www.meta.com/ai-glasses/ Google Android XR AI announcement: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/android-xr-gemini-glasses-headsets/ World Health Organization: Blindness and vision impairment fact sheet: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment Timestamps: 0:00 Kevin Gibbons of Cytronic joins the show 5:29 How small is a micro fulfillment center? 9:59 Squarespace - Turn your idea into a beautiful website! Go to https://www.squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 11:33 Understanding the unit economics 20:24 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 22:29 Why fulfillment costs rise as you scale 29:46 Automatons Roll Out 30:12 Matthias Hofmann of Eyebot joins the show 30:31 Agree.com - Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack. Go to https://agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life! 31:29 Vision tests vs. eye exams 42:28 The terrifying doctor shortage 47:22 Fundraising and partnerships 57:07 Will we always need human doctors in the loop? Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Alex: X: https//x.com/alex Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. Okay, rewind the clock back to the COVID era. There was a boom in warehouse hiring because we pulled forward quite a lot of e-commerce growth effectively overnight. Now, today, we hear more about how e-commerce giants are adding automation to their fulfillment systems and really getting a lot of benefits from that, cost control, speed, efficiency. But what about the smaller sellers? Are they reaping the same rewards from automation? If they are dependent on existing third-party logistics providers, maybe not. But there's one startup that wants to change that by bringing a fleet of robots and smart software to a warehouse near you. So please join me in welcoming to the show, it's Kevin Gibbon, the co-founder and CEO of Cytronic. Kevin, how are you?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Great, glad to be back.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Agree.com. Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract to cash stack. Go to Agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life. Northwest Registered Agent. Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more with no purchase required. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain. And Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  I'm so glad you're here. Now, we've spoken over the years. I've covered a couple of your companies and it's, one, lovely to see you again. Your hair is still in place, how dare you.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  It is, yes. That's okay.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  But, but why are you doing this again? You, you built Ship, you scaled it, didn't work out the way we wanted it to. Then you built Airhouse, that you sold to a company last year. And here we are with Cytronic, you're taking another bite of this apple. Why is this itch not sated yet inside of you?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  I think that building a really great company and it's just really hard. And I think every single time that I do it, I just learn something new. And then I just get interested in where it's kind of pulled me. So I started Ship 13 years ago, something like that. And it was, I was an eBay power seller and it was just really hard. And it was a great consumer shipping service. It was not a great venture-backed business. Learned a ton and then took it to Airhouse where I learned a lot about the warehousing aspect of things. And I was like, well, I don't actually want to have a bunch of like, we had our own warehouses and fleets of couriers at Ship. I'm like, I don't want to deal with the people problem. Like, I'm just going to go just purely software.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  So Airhouse was a marketplace for 3PLs. So we would work with 3PL, we'd figure out which ones are good. And then we had to have a network across the US and then globally. And it worked really well. And then I just kind of like continued to fall into like, what is the, like, shipping and logistics is a huge, huge category. But like, across the board, what is the biggest pain point? And really, it's cost. And then with, especially with the e-commerce, it's speed. So if you can fundamentally change that in some way, you can, like, you can just build something that everybody's going to want and use. And that's what I kind of, like, figured out at, when we started Cytronic.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. But also, yes, you can make a good business out of it. But there are some benefits to, I would say, the broader economy at the same time. Because if you can help the smaller seller, the smaller DTC brand, dare I say, even the mom and pop, have a fulfillment system that is competitive with what Amazon has built for itself, then they can better compete with the incumbents, yeah?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, totally. And we see that all the time. Like, half our customers right now at Cytronic, they're TikTok sellers. They're the people that are just blowing up overnight. So it's, it's really empowering those people and then scaling with them.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  I think we all kind of like look down our nose a little bit at companies that are like big on selling on Instagram, but like, how much stuff in your house, dear listener and viewer, came from Instagram ads? So none of us can judge. And frankly, these are small businesses, we should support them. And that brings us to what you're actually building with Cytronic. So I want to talk about the robots you have. There's a number of different robots you're bringing to these warehouses that are then essentially orchestrated through software. It's kind of IRL orchestration. Forget agents for a minute, everybody will talk about the real world today. But I think these are off-the-shelf. So tell me about which robots you've picked and what they do, and then how they kind of work in concert to replace human labor inside of warehouses.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Right. So it really is, it's physical AI for commerce is what we're building. And it's really looking at a use case that I'm very familiar with, which is e-commerce fulfillment. And really just like thinking through, how can you get the cost? How can you actually bend that cost curve? What's available today that wasn't available two, five years ago? And it really is the robotics. And so looking at the different point solutions, like, any one of these companies independently is not like transformative to an individual business. But if you put together enough of them and then manage them as a service, it can become one. So some of the major systems that we have, so we actually do a combination of both buying and also we do some light manufacturing today.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  That may change as we continue to scale. So we have a robotics team and we do some of this stuff and we have to. We're, we are like a hardware robotics company at the end of the day. Whether we actually buy the robots or we build them, we still need to maintain them and all that stuff.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  Oh, I hadn't thought of that. In between. Yeah, you'd have to have the parts and know-how in-house and also across all your different warehouses. Yeah, okay.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I don't, and even taking it a step further, it's also the, the real estate side. So what kind of site are you actually going to put these in? So we actually operate micro fulfillment centers. So about 30,000 square feet. And because we use robots, we could actually be closer to the city centers. So we don't have to worry about the high labor cost, people traveling. We just have a very, we still do have employees that, that will do a lot of the managing. But it really enables us to get close to the customer, have a really tight space, and then use a lot of these different robotics. So one of the, there's kind of like four different components within our warehouse today, which definitely will change. But again, I think it's really important, and especially for any robotics founder, whoever, you can't do everything with these today. You can't.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  So like, I kind of stumbled across a use case that is very, very great for robotics. And that is, you're taking, you, a brand has, call it 100 different SKUs. And you store it around typically in a warehouse. And what you need to do is that when you're, the buyers buy something, you need to take those, whatever they've ordered, three of A SKU, B SKU, whatever, and you need to collect it and put it into an actual order. So either like a poly bag or a box. And so that operation is actually quite expensive on the human side. So it requires, like, if it's not completely non-automated warehouse, you have people walking miles per day in these warehouses, and it is still the majority of the market doesn't have any automation at all.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  And so we're able to take that task, that cost, like, even the best out there, like, in labor cost, like $2.50 per order, that's their cost. That's not what they, they will charge you. And we're able to take it down to cents with doing the actual robotics. And I could get further into that.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Let me, let me, let me back a couple things. So some off-the-shelf robots, some stuff you're working on in-house. And these robots, the idea is essentially robotic automation inside of warehouses and fulfillment. So when something arrives at your warehouse, let's say I'm a seller and I'm selling donut keychains. And I deliver them. Once they get dropped off, are the robots able to essentially handle them from intake to storage to picking to packaging and then to drop them off into the truck without a human touching them?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  So not all of those, no. There, there are some, some pieces. So I'll break it down. So you, you have the receiving process. That today is like probably the biggest need still for human labor. You have a bunch of different products coming from a bunch of different manufacturers. It's not all the same. It's really hard to automate that. But also, if you, if you look at the percentage of time that actually takes to put it into a storage system, it's not that much. And then the next step is that you store it into whatever racking system you have. And then you have to actually pick things. And so what we use is we use was called an ASRS system, Automatic Storage and Retrieval System. So there's dozens of these companies worldwide out there.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  And typically, they're only available to like the Walmarts of the world. So Walmart will pay like a, like a systems integrator, probably $50 to $100 million per warehouse. And then they use a combination of these ASRS systems. And then also, some of them, not a lot of them, will actually have robotic picking arms and the actual conveyance and sortation and all of these different pieces. But it's only available to like the largest retailers. It's not, it hasn't even made it into the 3PLs that other smaller companies have done. 3PL industry is not automated at all. It's just the Walmarts and a lot of these grocery stores. I know, it's crazy.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  This is the place where we've seen so much progress in automation. I mean, how many generations of robots has Amazon built to move around its racks inside of its warehouses? Like, ah!

• 9:12Speaker 01

  The problem actually with Amazon is interesting, is that they just have too much historical stuff on there. So like, everybody points out that Amazon is the leader and I would, it's hard to argue with that. But they're using a 20-year-old system. Like, Kiva Robotics is not the ideal for e-commerce picking. It doesn't make sense. They're literally moving aisles to a picker. Like, think of that for a sec. Like, like, it's mini, like, like shore warehouse, like, like, to.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  It's like bringing the gas station to the car. It's like bringing the movie theater to your backyard. What are we doing here?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that's why it looks like chaos and, well, it looks very nice and it's maybe like an orchestra playing with all the film and stuff. But it's just a lot of moving stuff and it's really, it's inefficient. That's what it is. And they need thousands of these robots, yes.

• 10:00Speaker 03

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• 10:56Speaker 00

  But with your system, even with some humans, let's just say in the loop, for lack of a better phrase, you can still offer dramatic cost reductions to your customers because you're taking out as much of the human labor as possible.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  And if anyone listening is concerned about automation killing off human labor, we're automating the worst jobs. Amazon warehouses are not places that are, based on everything that I've read, a lovely place to spend your time. So I think this is, this is a great example of where automation does help a lot. So I'm with you on that. Now, you guys talk about up to 80% cost reductions for your customers.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  That is a staggering amount of savings. So I'm curious, is that, you know, best number for the exact product that happens to fit well? Or is that a number that you think maybe, I don't know, half of your customers can achieve?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  We do that today. Yeah, so I'll, let's, let's talk real numbers. So

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  3PL typically will charge you like $3, maybe $3.50 for fulfillment, depending on how many, like average number of SKUs per order, let's call it two. And we can get that, like we, we charge you, it's 50 cents per order, 10 cents per pick. So that same order would be 70 cents. And we still make like really good money on that, on gross margins, because it's mostly robots.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  Okay, but, but, but, but, but great gross margins off 70 cents are still cents.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  And the robots you're buying can't be cheap. Robotics is not famous for its low costs.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  And you do have to have real estate, as you said, you know, closer to your customers, which is higher cost than having it out in the sticks. So what kind of volume do you need to run through one of your smaller, you know, 30,000 square foot centers to make the, the math pencil out?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's roughly, it's about 10,000 orders per day to when we start getting into some real profits. We can, we, we've tested it out, we could do about 30,000 orders a day. And just to get like, people understand, and a lot, and all the people really understand fulfillment. But just think of robotics in like its simplest terms, like this is what it was meant to do. Like robotics was supposed to like be a step change in like cost or speed or whatever. It's not supposed to like replicate what a human was doing. So instead of walking the warehouse floor, like we don't have humanoids doing all these things. And so we could bring down the cost just so dramatically.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And then the only real way that this stuff really is going to get adopted is not because you want robots in your warehouse. Cause also you have to upkeep and all that, there's more overhead. You have to completely change the cost curve. And the only way you could do that is if you fully vertically integrate. You have all, all these facilities. Yeah, you have to purchase them upfront, so I'll give you some, some real numbers. 1.2, 1.2 million dollars in upfront capex per warehouse.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  That's not that much.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  It's not that much, no. But to be fair, like we have a very experienced team and a lot of great

• 13:55Speaker 00

  I'm not, I'm not talking down your investments. I'm just saying like, I thought there was going to be another zero in that thing.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  That's, that's what, that's what I want it, yeah. It's, it's, I think that somebody going, like say a small business tried to do this, or honestly even Walmart. They're, they're going to go to a systems integrator. They're going, they are going to pay at least like probably four or five times that. So that's our costs, because we are the systems integrator. It's all of our software. We work in, inside of all of these different separate systems and then bringing them together. But that's the actual hard cost for the actual hardware. So you can imagine like when you're doing 20, 30,000 orders a day. And yeah, even if you are only making 50 cents, 60 cents, that's a pretty damn good bit. When you're operating like 30 days a, a week, like per warehouse, the payback on that is very, very fast.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  No, all, all that checks out. I wasn't sure about the, the, how much volume you could push through a 30,000 square facility. But it sounds like if you make, as you said, reasonable profit at 10K and that can scale up to 30.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Well, then the economics look absolutely beautiful. And the repayment period for the investment is going to be, I'm not going to run the math in my head, but like less than a year. I mean, it's going to be pretty quick.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  It's faster than that, yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, faster than that, yeah. I was trying to be, try to put a loose, loose cap on that.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, I'll, yeah, that's, that's a, that's a good number, yeah.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  So I'm confused about one part though. Now, I don't think we should have humans walking 47 miles in an Amazon warehouse, putting toothbrushes into little carts. I think that's, it's pretty silly. But I'm not sure about why labor costs don't scale linearly with essentially volume. You, on your side, you guys talk about how like labor costs kind of spiral as you grow. And to me, that doesn't make a lot of sense, because if you have 10 orders, one person, then you do 30 orders, three people, it seems kind of like one, two, three. What am I missing in that calculation?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Overhead as far as management and facilities costs. That's where you just pack on so much cost, but also the complexity gets really hard. Quality typically goes down. And so that's why you don't see a lot of like, the single 3PL really owning everything. Amazon is a great example, but that's because they do their own products, right? Like that's different. They, they're not doing it, they're not competing in the open marketplaces with all of these other providers. So there, there's a very long tail of like billion dollar 3PLs out there. And that's because it's just really hard to scale it. You can't scale it linearly. Like I, I was in the, like not only the ship, arguably that was a 3PL. We actually did our own labor and all that.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  But it's like, I saw this at our house all the time. We worked with dozens of different 3PLs and they'd all have the same problem. It's like the management of people, it just breaks. Every single one of these warehouses break and it comes down to the human element. And that's because they just don't have enough leverage. It's like, you still have to get more and more people and it's usually a lot of temp labor. And also you're, you're typically have to locate these, like to get the, your cost down, you got to get your labor cost down, which means you're in a location that it's, it's probably in the middle of nowhere. Like, so, and you probably are competing with other warehousing jobs. It's just really tough. So it's like, it takes a bad supervisor, bad GM, it, it takes a misalignment in management. And then all of a sudden, everything comes crumbling down.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  And that's why like fulfillment is like one of the only things that as you scale, it actually gets more expensive on a per unit cost.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  That's, that's crazy, but I, I, and I'm glad you told me that, because I never would have guessed that.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  So it really makes the, the idea of having your smaller facilities with automation

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  make a lot of sense, because you don't have the same problem. And also you can be closer to customers for faster ship time. So it's kind of like, it, it feels kind of win, win, win in that case.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Win, win, win.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  If you are an existing 3PL who are going to get the rug ripped out from underneath them. But short of that.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, well, it's, look, it's, it's, we're, we're in a competitive marketplace. And I think ultimately, like who is, who are the people that are going to benefit? It's going to be consumers and brands, right? Like, like we're all competing and we all want our stuff faster and, and cheaper. And like, I, I'd love for more of my favorite brands to be like, have same day delivery and everything. And they can't afford it.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yes. Which brings you to a question. So we talked, you know, getting the cost of, of, of picking storage and, you know, getting something ready to go out of a warehouse. Super key, get that down, lovely.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Now, on the, the shipping side of this,

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  I presume that you plug into existing delivery services?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. So we, we'll use today's standard carriers. So the UPSs, the, the, whoever, international carriers, DHL, whoever, they'll come to our, our warehouses today. It's very simple. We're, we're not trying to invent everything, but yeah, that's what it is today.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  I was just curious if there's going to be any possibility to work with some of the, the drone delivery companies. We talked to ZipLine here on the show. I feel like they've kind of proven early scale. There's also a company called Manna from Ireland that we had on the show. They're moving into the US. And so it seems that when we think about low cost, Local

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Uh, quick deliveries. Drones are becoming less of a pipe dream and more of a possibility.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  I think so. I, I, I, and absolutely like for us, we will use whatever is cheapest and fastest and not high quality. So we're into partnering, um, potentially we'll, we'll look at maybe even like doing some of it for, for our actual like delivery. Like the fulfillment is really our, our wedge into like the broader ecosystem. Um, and wherever we can trim costs and pass those savings to our customers, we're going to. The highest cost of an actual like, uh, e-commerce transaction outside of the marketing and then the product, it is shipping and fulfillment. Shipping is actually more expensive than fulfillment. Um, so we're, we're taking off the fulfillment piece, which really is just like an extra tax. Like what, why wouldn't you as a brand just want an extra two to 5% gross margins just in your like, it's like a no brainer.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Extra 5% gross margins could revolutionize someone's business from break even to consistently profitable.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  People don't really even believe what we're selling. It's like, no, it's, it's real.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  I mean, I mean, like, like I've known you for a minute.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  I know you're a real legitimate entrepreneur and I still kinda wanna go see one of your facilities and be like, really 80%?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Come.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Uh, well, actually that's a great segue because, uh, according to some news I read about your funding announcement.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  You have facilities in the San Francisco Bay area. You're building one in Dallas and you have a third, uh, where's the other one?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Chicago, Chicago.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Chicago, right.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  So why those two locations? How did setup go? And how much volume are you currently handling as your company kind of leaves stealth and goes to market?

• 20:25Speaker 03

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• 21:09Speaker 03

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• 21:19Speaker 01

  So we started off in the Bay, um, and really because that's where myself and the, the, the founding, my co-founder and the, the team live. Um, and also great place to start a venture back company. And our first facility was our R and D facility. Um, and that's where we just tried to make the, like, I, I knew this company is gonna be a really important one. If we get the cost out. Yeah, I was as skeptical as you were. I, I, um, but I needed to see it and I needed to prove it. And so we did that at a very small scale. Um, so the, the actual facility is, uh, it's about a 10th of the size of, of, uh, our, um, the ones that we're, we're now expanding out.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  So it's about 2,000, yeah, 2, 3,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the exact same technology, um, that, that we are, are using for our, our rollout. We proved it. Um, and just with, with us and internal, we actually had our, our own brand that we just were just selling a bunch of stuff on. And, uh, it worked great. Um, and we were doing all the fulfillment, like we were, we were managing the, the robots and we were debugging stuff and all that. And then we got to the point where I was like, okay, we're, we're ready to start thinking about taking on more capital and then gonna expand this. And, uh, and then offer it to the broader market. And that's when it's like, okay, if you're, if you are in, uh, e-commerce logistics, like, there's a few things. You, you need to have a central operations because you need to, your first location needs to be central.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  So Chicago, Dallas, somewhere in the middle of the country. So you're able to, to reach the coast in a relatively like short amount of time. So that's why we launched, uh, Chicago first. Um, and then it's gonna be about the coast. So we're, we're, we're getting ready to launch, uh, LA. Uh, New Jersey is gonna be at, at the, the end of the year. Um, and then it'll be about, uh, kind of, uh, just expanding this to every other major market, getting closer to your customers. And then, uh, spreading a brand's inventory across our different locations.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  These facilities that we're talking about, they're gonna bring on this year, are those the, um, I think you said like, like, you know, 30,000 square feet, you know, up to 10 to 30,000 packages a day. Okay. So they're the full zoot.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  The full zoot.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Okay. Okay. Awesome. So how are you getting brands to sign up with you? Because the 3PL market is quite large. Uh, you're competing with some degree to Amazon and their fulfillment network. I presume it's not that easy to get a lot of folks to show up. At the same time, you do have a lot of history here. You probably know a lot of people. So how goes the, uh, getting brands to pick you side of things?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  So I think that what gets everybody's attention is the robotics, obviously. And then that's kind of like, uh, hey, we're automating this. And everybody is like, yeah, that makes sense. It's like, of course. Okay. Well, we'll take a call or whatever. And where we get people to actually sign on is, is the cost. It, it really is. It's, it is such a no brainer. After you trust us, that's the biggest hurdle we had to overcome early days, uh, when we were, um, nothing. And just like, uh, we did hire our R and D facility, but now we have real customers and, and all of that. But it really like, I've been in this industry for a long time. Like Airhouse was arguably solving the same problem. Our like close rates are unbelievable. And also the, the other important thing, and I know we talked a lot about small business.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  But our ability to go up market is unlike anything I've ever seen before. So the exact product is the same for like a 50 to a hundred million dollar brand.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  I was thinking about this when you said you built your test facility with a couple thousand square feet and the same system. To me, that implies a lot of modularity.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  That you can scale it up and down. So that I don't see a reason why, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, you couldn't go from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 square feet. And just have more of the machines in there? Like, they're robots. They don't smell bad. You don't get mad about being packed in.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Right. Well, well, actually the, so the benefit of having a more module, smaller footprint is that, um, you can be located in city center. So one of the things we actually didn't talk about is like the real estate. How, like where do you get these facilities? Um, and like, I, like, we don't need to be in the middle of nowhere. Like we, we don't need to be from a cost standpoint. We don't have the, the per unit costs, um, that a, a labor heavy, uh, 3PL would be. So it makes sense for us to be closer to the city. So, um, and that lends itself to being in smaller facility. You're not gonna get 300,000 square feet, uh, uh, in the middle of, uh, San Francisco or something, as you, as you could, but it, it.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  But then you'd have no money.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, totally. And so the, the smaller nature, it, it de rests a lot of things. So you prove out one, then you replicate them. And then you're able to have this like containerized unit that it is more on the small side. Sure. But you don't get a lot of the economies of scale by just expanding it. You actually get more benefit to go in more places. Because then, then you're not only like changing the, the fulfillment, um, uh, uh, curve on the cost. But you're, you're now moving the, the shipping needle. So, and that's how we're able to go up market. It's like a brand that is a hundred million, a hundred million dollar brand, they should probably be in, I don't know, four or five different locations across the US. And they'll see substantial savings on the shipping side.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And so for us being able to be in so many different markets is actually better than having fewer larger facilities.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Which is the inverse of how things had been going, which was enormous distribution facilities that serve many, many markets. I mean, if you've been on the highway and you've driven past an enormous building with like 50, 18 wheelers out there, that's what we're talking about. Okay. So you guys only raised, uh, I think it's 13 and a half million dollars.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  And I say only, that's a very large C round and well done and.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Applause.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  10, 10 points. Sorry. I didn't, that was so dismissive. Um, don't delete what I said before, but here's another take at that. You just raised 13.5 million dollars. Congratulations, Kevin.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  No, but I mean, uh, clearly very large aspirations here. And I think there's actually some pretty cool things you could do. I was just trying to Google and try to remember the name of the company, Serve Robotics. They have the little delivery bots that go on your sidewalk. They're public and they're only worth $450 million. Which is like for the public markets, uh, like a plugged nickel and a piece of gum.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  And like, think about how cool it would be if your facilities in these urban areas had their own dedicated fleet. So you could tell people like, look, not only will we cut all your fulfillment costs, but we also have, if your delivery is nearby, we can just do it for you too. Like there's so much you can add here. There's even assets in market that are relatively cheap. So. Are you guys gonna be, I know this is kind of silly question, but

• 27:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  super aggressive in trying to like capture market share quickly? Cause I don't want anyone else to like come behind you. So my question is, how aggressive are you guys going to be? Because I can see a lot of inorganic growth opportunities ahead for Cytronic.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  So for us and how we've even gotten here is focus. Like we're not like, we turn down customers all the time. When they want to do a lot of B two B stuff, they want to do some custom like packaging or inserts or anything like that, we just say no. We're like, when you're ready to really want, you want cheap and fast fulfillment operations, you come see us. And so the answer is we have to stay focused. And I think that is the only way that that that's going to be the start of like where you see robotics companies actually chip off at the incumbents are these very focused use cases. But one other thing is that I think that the broader, like you, you bring out the different point solutions, which we use them, we love them. It's amazing, it's amazing that venture kind of is backing this industry.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  But as an actual like business and even maybe as, as, as an investment, these point solutions are really tough because there's a lot of competition. There's not really a lot of defensibility. So like my broader thesis on the market is that there is going to be a service layer on top of a lot of these different point solutions, whether that's in logistics or something like that. And the people that are able to roll up a lot of these technologies and continue to use the cheapest, fastest, whatever it is, whether they manufacture it themselves or they, they go and partner, that is where all the value is going to increase too. It's those, those service levels versus the actual point solutions, the individual robotic arm piece, whatever. I just believe that it's going to mostly get commoditized, which I think for a lot

• 29:12Speaker 04

  of industries is going to be a great thing because it's going to enable a lot of stuff.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. But fundamentally, what you're doing is making e-commerce even better.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Which I think means that if you own a mall, this is the last chopper out. Drop that asset because we're not going back. Kevin, an absolute treat. The website is cytronic.ai, C Y T R O N I C dot A I. And is there a job you're hiring for? You'd love to shout out to our, our

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Everything you, yeah, you want to be in tech and you want to be a part of something really awesome and, and, and yeah, hit me up. I'm Kevin Givens also on Twitter.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  All right. Thank you very much. We'll see you soon. As you may have noticed, if you've ever seen this show in video format, I'm a glasses wearer. I've worn glasses since third grade. I have glasses of all types, fancy sunglasses, very basic regular glasses, you name it, I've worn them. I even had sports goggles back in my high school wrestling days, a little out of fashion now, but they were a real thing. Now I learned about a company called iBot and what they are doing is putting kiosks into places around the world where you can go walk up and get a new glasses prescription in 90 seconds. I love this idea. I love the idea of bringing healthcare to the people, getting people what they need at a lower price point, applying technology to longstanding issues to make them just easier to solve. So please join me in welcoming Matthias Hoffman, CEO and co-founder of iBot to the show to tell us all about how he's going to make everyone see that much better. Matthias, welcome to the show.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  Our show is filled with helpful and practical advice for founders, but there's another reason to become a regular twist listener. Amazing deals on essential products to help you run your company more effectively. So I'm super excited to announce our new deal with agree.com, the all in one contract to cash flow workflow. Go right now to agree.com, sign up and tell them you're a J Cal listener and they'll give you 50% off for life. Agree is the number one fastest way to go from contract to cash. That means gathering these signatures, invoicing, billing, payments and revenue recovery. No more jumping between four or five different platforms, just to write out a contract, get it signed, then set up billing and start sending out invoices.

• 31:13Speaker 05

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• 31:29Speaker 00

  I'm very glad to have you here because I do feel like around the world, getting the correct prescription for your eyes is much harder than it should be. And I kind of think of iBot as a company that could help a lot more folks have more accurate and regular prescriptions. But let's talk about the technology first. Most people listen to this, I think when they get their eyes checked, they go in to see probably an ophthalmologist and they have a big workup like I was describing in the intro. You guys are offering something a little bit simpler and a little bit more targeted. So why don't you explain to us how it works?

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. So iBot is a vision testing technology. It's really in the format of a kiosk that anyone can walk up to. And you go through a battery of tests. The whole thing only takes about 90 seconds. And then within that time, you know, you punch in your, after you do the test, you punch in your name, information, email, and then it goes, all that information that gets packaged goes to the cloud and gets paired with one of our teledoctors who then review that session and then write a script to, to your eyes. So you can essentially get an eyeglass prescription within minutes. So no planning, no scheduling, you just walk up.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Well, one, that's fantastic. A lot of people just need to get their eyes checked once every couple of years. They're not like myself and maybe you need a little bit more. But I think we're kind of talking about the difference between an eye exam and a vision test. And I think that for most people, those are quite literally the same thing. So can you break down what you're offering and how it might be different from people who are accustomed to getting their eyes dilated once a year?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. So the, the comprehensive eye exam is really a battery of tasks. So it's quite a big, a bundle of tests, actually, if you want to call it that.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  And the first portion of a comprehensive exam, when you go to an eye doctor or an optometrist is the vision testing portion. So like you, you sort of put your head into a machine, maybe I look at a balloon. Maybe it's like a flippy lens machine that, you know, you look at and look at some letters. And there's a couple more things, but really that's all to test the clarity of your vision. And from there, the doctor can then tailor a prescription to you so that when you wear a pair of glasses or contact lenses, you see better, right? That's the whole point. And we've, as a, as a human species, we've figured that out. Like this is a really solved problem. Now there's a second portion actually of the comprehensive eye exam and that is checking

• 33:51Speaker 04

  your eye health. So that's when you kind of do the puff test and maybe sometimes you dilate your eyes. Nowadays, actually, it's kind of falling out of favor, but you know, kind of dilating your eyes and you actually see the back of the eye. So you see the retina. And there's a many more tests that you do to check the, the health of the eye. And so like I said, the, the, the comprehensive eye exam, which iBot, you know, encourages anyone to, to do that on a very frequent basis is important. It's, it's, it's really essential to maintaining our health. So the eye is essentially the, the, the, the window to our health. It's actually one of the few spots or only spots where you can directly see your blood vessels without actually having to cut yourself.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  And, and so you can, you can diagnose diabetes actually through, through a comprehensive eye exam, believe it or not. So there's, there's many things that can be diagnosed through that.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  So eyes are not the window to the soul, they're the window to watching our blood bump around.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity beyond just, you know, being able to get to a prescription. Like there's a many more things that can be diagnosed, including cancers, certain kinds of cancers or neurological issues. And that's essentially what you get out of a comprehensive eye exam. You get a full battery of things. Now the, and what we identified, and I think that's resonates in general, when I talk to people about this, is that getting an eyeglass prescription, just to get a new pair of glasses is unbelievably hard and frustrating

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  for people. Like it's a multi-week, multi-month process sometimes for people. Now, in, in many cases, people should get that comprehensive exam, but if you've broken your glasses or you have scratched lenses, or you're just unhappy with your current glasses, you know, you may actually not need to go through that whole suite or, or bundle of tests. Actually, all you need is a pair of new glasses or contact lenses, which for that you only need an eyeglass prescription. And that's really where iBot today comes in. So our technology is very mature and very accurate. And it allows people to get to that eyeglass prescription very quickly.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  And to the point where it's a matter of minutes where you don't need to do any scheduling or planning. You just essentially our iBot technologies and our units are in eyeglass stores and some of the biggest, most prominent retailers like Walmart and Sam's Club. And so it allows you to just walk in, take a test, get an eyeglass prescription and buy a pair of glasses. You should be able to buy a pair of glasses like you buy anything. It should be that easy, right? And that's what we're doing. So, but we're not doing the health portion yet. And that's

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Right. Okay. Well, we'll talk about that in a second, but this makes a lot of sense to me because whenever I now go for my yearly exam, they send me down in front of an automatic machine. It goes, and then like makes a perfect image for my eyes. And then they just kind of check it. And then I think, well, are we done? And the answer is no, because I need some other stuff. But like, I'm amazed at how good that's become. When I feel like when I was a child, they really had to start with all the flippy lenses. You know, it took a while to actually kind of dial it in, whereas now they jumped to like nine, the 99th percentile of it. So

• 37:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  This makes a lot of sense to me. What does a person pay to, to use your kiosk? And then also where do the teledoctors come into the loop?

• 37:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. Great question. So the first question is the cost. So it's anywhere between $0 to $25, right? So we want to not only make it unbelievably easy for people to get to the eyes checked and to get an eyeglass prescription, but also we want to lower the cost so much that you really have no reason to not do this. And, and that really unblocking and removing all the hurdles and barriers that people have to getting an essential service, like getting a new pair of eyeglasses is like getting a new pair of shoes. It's, it's a fundamental thing that we need. And And so that's why we're really focused on this low cost approach.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  The way we actually solve this is that we have business relationships with the retailer, with the enterprise, so that they have some agency on how much to charge for that prescription. In most cases, our partners actually charge zero dollars to the customer because it is obviously a benefit that drives people in.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  And so it's sort of this win win solution that we have great business relationships with the retailers. The retailers get more traffic to get incremental customers and revenue. And the consumer and the patient gets a free prescription. That's amazing. And we know that's that drives people in because, I mean, there's many statistics out there, but the lower third of income level in the United States is half as likely to go see an eye doctor.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  It's a money problem, right? Like, they don't have vision insurance. Half of Americans have vision insurance and the other half just doesn't.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  That was me growing up, so I'm intimately aware of this. And also, I read a study that showed the impact of going to a lower income school and giving all the kids eye exams and glasses and what happened to their reading scores. It turns out they couldn't not read, they just couldn't see.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  And that, that was one of the most heartbreaking things that I've ever read because think about these kids who don't know better and are kind of walking through the world effectively. And I say this as someone who's not blind, but like, you know, pretty poorly visioned, walking through the world in a daze. And so I'm an enormous fan of the idea of getting the cost down here and baking this into essentially other services to make it more available.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. I bought is here to really level the playing field. Like, it's the, if you have vision insurance or not, it doesn't really matter, right? Your co-pay is more than $25. So it's basically even for everybody in terms of cost, in terms of access. And especially we do really well in rural communities where there's frankly, just no doctors around.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Where there's frankly, no doctors around. I mean, we talk about food deserts quite a lot and kind of, you know, modern culture, but I think we don't talk enough about specialist drugs or deserts as well. And like ophthalmology is, well, you can make a lot of money doing it in a big city, but I don't think you're going to set up shop in the sticks, probably.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  On the business part, though, my understanding, and I'm not mad about this, so don't, don't take this the wrong way, but is that when we buy a pair of frames, we're paying quite a lot of margin to the company in question. And is that margin what allows partner frames companies to essentially subsidize the cost of having the kiosk and the telehealth doctor? Because I can see how that math could work out. I just want to make sure that I'm understanding kind of the model.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I guess I didn't answer your previous question on the teledoctor. So, yeah, so it's our own teledoctor network, right? So we have our ophthalmologists and we have our optometrists. And, yeah, they, they get queued in depending on which state it is. And they obviously, they're all licensed in the, in the state that they, they work in and prescribe in. The data that we collect goes to doctors and they, they look at the data, we even present the data the same way, in a chart, the same way they would in their own clinic. So that's sort of the ramp up speed and time for doctors to, to, to work with I bought is very quick because they, you know, it looks like it's the same kind of layout.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  And they use their clinical judgment and training and schooling to write and craft eyeglass prescription the same way they would with patients in their own clinic.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  So that's, that's the answer to your previous question.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  What's the doctor vibe on this? Because on one hand, I can see if I'm an ophthalmologist, I don't maybe want to see my patients less frequently, but also I don't want to be the person who's just helping people adjust their eye prescription. Like, that seems like a, like a misuse of my time. And also, people could also moonlight with you guys, I presume, and, and add to their overall clinical load. So where do doctors land in terms of viewing you as like a helper versus politely a competitor?

• 41:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's obviously the big question here. And that's something we're, you know, even in terms of making the industry understand about what we're doing, we're here to fill a gap, right? We're not here to displace doctors. We're not here to, to, you know, like, take people's jobs or anything like that. In fact, what's happening right now is that the amount of, the, the gap of doctors right now, in terms of patients that need care, is actually growing. So 10 years ago, when I, when I joined this industry, I think it was, one optometrist would have to care for about 3,000 to 4,000 patients a year. Today, it's one in 5,000 per year. It's almost impossible.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  And, and in 10 years, it's going to be about 8,000, one in 8,000. So it's just the, the amount of doc, the amount of doctors actually is decreasing in the United States.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Is that because ophthalmology is a less attractive specialty for, for doctors leaving medical school and they choose residency? Or is that just because?

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Why is it going up so fast?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a, there's a very rapidly decreasing pipeline into residency programs for ophthalmology. And, and optometry is relatively flat right now. And you could argue on the decline in terms of how many students are going, actually getting the board certified per year. It's actually on the decline. So our population is growing.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Our, our, our need for eyeglasses is actually increasing because our kids are 80% more myopic than they were 20 years ago. Screen reading, exactly, like not enough outdoor time. And so those are going to, those kids are going to be adults soon and, and they're going

• 43:45Speaker 00

  They're going to wear glasses.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Or glasses. So, yeah, if you're in the glasses, contact lens business, you know, the, the revenue is going up, the, the demand is going up. But, but the amount of available doctors is actually decreasing. And that's the surprising thing. And so I bought is here is, is simply here to fill the gap. And I think once the community understands that, and we talked to many doctors, they, they totally understand the need, they see it themselves. Optometrists are oftentimes with their own independent clinic booked out for weeks and months, right? And, and, and same is true for ophthalmologists.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  The, the ophthalmology is, is projected to have 20 to 30% fewer ophthalmologists in 10 years. And this is coming from the community. This is not like an independent study.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  Like a red alert from some of the big trade associations in ophthalmology.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  It's kind of incredible how I feel like every medical specialty is just under, my spouse is in medicine, so I have some insight into different specialties. And everyone has the same kind of story that you're telling me now, which is like patient loads going up, number of available providers is flat or heading down. Everyone wants to get into something that's super specialized because it's higher value, blah, blah, blah. No one wants to, it's.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  American healthcare, man.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Got some holes in it.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  What we're seeing here is that the only way to meet the demand of today and even into the future is that we need to automate healthcare and by extent, and what we're doing is automating eye care. And there's no other way. The four wall clinic with a room full of equipment does not scale to the demand today and, and the demand to the future. It's impossible.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Especially if you found a place where it is mechanically done even by the doctors, as we talked about earlier, like, like similar technology. Okay, so what's a kiosk cost to build? I think we're all familiar with kiosks, mostly they give us candies or whatever. Yours is a bit more technical, I presume it has a higher kind of bomb. So what does it cost to kind of put one of these into a location?

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can't speak to like how our manufacturing costs, but it is a, it is by far the most high tech kiosk out in the world. That I can say. And it, it has gone through eight generations of R and D over multiple years. It is the state of the art on multiple kinds of technologies, actually, that you use in the optometry clinic. So we have a very advanced auto refraction technology. We have a very advanced visual acuity system that compresses the, the letters. When you look inside, everything is 20 feet away visually. And yeah, I have to focus to 20 feet, but obviously the kiosk is not 20 feet long.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  No, it looks like it's about 12, 14, 15 inches like deep, I think, yeah.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and so the, the distance actually even shifts. When you get to the balloon part, we also have a balloon part that's familiar to people. And you look inside and look at the balloon and it's actually scanning your eyes while you're just standing there casually. So it's, you know, everything is built from the ground up and is, and developed from the ground up. And we also have a lens omechnic technology built in that also scans your existing glasses and extracts all those settings. And so we can transfer those settings to a new pair of glasses with, of course, adjustments that update your current settings that need to be done so that you have the absolute best settings that you need today.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  I, I ask about the, the cost of building this because there, you are not a asset light business, like you're not making enterprise software, right? This is a thing you have to go out and put into the world. So with your, I think it was a, it was a $20 million series A, right, Mateus?

• 47:28Speaker 04

  Yes, that's correct.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. So how far does that get you in terms of being able to put kiosks out in, into the market? I don't know if you're sharing costs with partners or not, but. What I don't know is, is this a hundred kiosks? Or is this 10,000 kiosk? I, I don't even know the zeros, you know?

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Well, one, one unit makes us a good amount of money. So, uh, but hundreds, uh, hundreds of kiosks, yes.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  And how long will it take to, to, to build those and get them out into the market? I know that, uh, supply chains have had a, a rough couple of years. I'm not sure if that impacts your production process.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  Uh, a little bit, but, uh, it's actually, uh, in terms of the tariffs, it's, uh, it's not really been too impactful to us. It's not something that keeps me up at night. It's not, it's not a top 20 problem.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. So it's quite down there.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Um, uh, and so we can, uh, really efficiently, uh, make these units now. And, uh, we have big orders coming in on containers on ships right now. So, uh, we're patiently awaiting, uh, you know, we, we just got a new place. We've got a new, uh, uh, staging and research, uh, research and manufacturing facility in Boston.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  And, uh, we're filling that up with inventory because we have a lot of units to put out there, so.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Which brings us to partnerships. Now, I know you guys have talked about, uh, partnering this January with the Framery and the company behind 1-800-CONTACT. Who else is in your, your partner portfolio? And can you work with everybody in the eyeglasses space? Because I don't see a reason why you need to pick one partner over another or have exclusivity.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, uh, we, we wanna work with everyone, right? We're, the selling glasses is not our business. We're in here to, uh, help do vision testing and, and getting people to, uh, the, the solution they need. That typically that's the prescription or contact lenses. And, uh, and so we're not a retailer. And so we work with retailers and provide our services. That's as simple as I can explain that. It's, um, now the, the different retailers have different products they sell. Broadly characterize that between, um, the traditional eyeglass retailers, uh, where they sell, uh, glasses. And then you actually asked the question about margin. I can, uh, happy to talk about that too.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  And, uh, the AI glasses, which is a sort of a new nascent, uh, industry that's growing now. And we're working with all of them. That's what I can share at this point. So from the traditional, uh, big logos, uh, that's, you know, sell glasses or chains and all the way to, and, and mid-market and independent stores. Um, and then in the AI glasses, which, you know, you've seen the Meta Ray-Bans and, uh, Google, of course, uh, also, uh, came up with new versions. And some other logos that I can't name are bringing out, uh, their own versions. And so all that is happening and so the new exciting, fast-growing market as well. And I bought us here to help unlock that, that bottom like is the prescription, right?

• 50:20Speaker 04

  Because if you wanna get a new pair of Meta Ray-Bans or you wanna get a new pair of AI glasses, you also need to have a prescription, uh, and people don't walk around with that in their pocket, so.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  No, and also you're talking about products that retail for a higher unit cost than your average set of frames. Uh, admittedly, the pair that I just bought, this is my backup pair. My kids broke my main pair twice. Shout out toddlers, just lovely people.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  I wanna go get like an Apple Vision Pro, but what I don't wanna do is go through this, the, the ridiculous annoyance of, of dealing with my prescription, its intensity, da, da, da. But if like I was a normal person and I wanted to get a pair of those and I wore a normal prescription, I would just go to the Apple Store, stand in front of the iBot kiosk for 90 seconds, have that inputted into my order. Like it just, it feels like this is a thing that should be brought into the physical location of a lot of places. So I really like the, the approach of this.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  So you're gonna see exactly that kind of, uh, business model, uh, in the coming months?

• 51:15Speaker 00

  I hope so, because I, I don't know, man. I'm still staring at monitors like I did when I was, you know, 10. It feels a little archaic. I would like to try something else. How is consumer reaction to this been? Because you and I clearly know, well, you know, a lot, I know a little, but we understand the space a little bit and how the technology works to some degree. The average person, uh, doesn't. Uh, are they comfortable with this?

• 51:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, actually, what's, uh, been surprising to us is the, the kind of uptake that we're seeing in terms of demographics, right? So, uh, this is the stuff that gives me goosebumps is like, and, and this is why I'm, the entire iBot team, uh, is, if you ask anyone on our team, like, why are you working on this? It typically has, is revolves around that the fact that we have a solution that works for so many different kinds of people. And I'm, what I'm saying here is like, all ethnic backgrounds, all cultural backgrounds, all skin colors, all like rich or poor, educated, not educated, uh, it doesn't matter.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Rural, urban, blue, red.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  We see everybody, we see doctors, we see bikers, we see grandmas, we see Amish people, right? We have Amish people getting eyeglass prescriptions from iBot. Like, how is that possible, right? But because there is a real, like, like, uh, like strong demand for this kind of service. And the alternatives, of course, waiting weeks. And, uh, so that's really what gets us super excited is just the, the humanity, uh, of, of what's, who's using this. That's one thing. That's one clear sign of, of, of something that's working for us. Now, the other thing, of course, that we always track is how happy are people with the glasses that they are using iBot, uh, prescriptions?

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Um, and what we're happy to report, and we have a ton of data on this now, is that, um, not only do we have really high MPS score customer satisfaction scores, uh, and, you know, 80-plus, uh, scores. We also have extremely low remake rates. Remake rate is, you know, how often do people go back and say, hey, I want this prescription changed. I don't like it.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  We beat the industry average by a considerable amount. So, uh, if you were to compare that to like how good our doctors are, uh, we're in the top 10% uh, of, of doctors nationwide.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  That, that's fantastic. Uh, I wanna go back to the, the, this works for everyone thing. And I was gonna bring this up dead last, but I'll just bring it up, Doc, some, I, I'm legitimately curious what your thinking is.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  On the point of American healthcare being a little bit uneven based on who it reaches and how and the quality of care that they get and what they have access to, uh, frames can still be relatively expensive. And I feel like what you guys have done as a company in a for-profit sense is a, is great technology, good distribution. And I think it's a great, great product. But for a lot of folks who don't have money or insurance or access to it, getting this prescription isn't gonna be the entire process. And you guys can't take that on because that's not your job. But are there any major charitable groups or, uh, programs that you could maybe supply a handful of iBot kiosks to, to allow them to bring them on the back of a truck or whatever, to places where they're needed

• 54:24Speaker 00

  to give you guys, uh, the ability to, to help more people faster than you might be able to with a more traditional, commercial-only rollout?

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So we are actually, uh, in discussions with multiple organizations, including the WHO. And I mean, there's so much opportunity overseas, right? Like in, in, in the Philippines or in, in certain nations, nations in Africa, like there's just, um, there's a lot of folks that need access to care. Uh, the, the statistic that I saw recently is like 1.5 billion humans on this planet right now are not seeing well. And all they need is a pair of glasses. It's crazy.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Man, for people who don't have vision problems, they don't understand how, how bad that, that, that can be. Now, not everyone has really bad vision, but like, you can't read signs when you're driving. You can't see the fork you dropped. You can't see your kids smile when they look at you. Like, this is a real loss. This is, and 1.5 billion people is, uh, what, 22% of the population, whatever?

• 55:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And the, the funny thing is that as a, as a, as a human race, as a species, you know, intelligent species, we figured out how to solve this problem. It's a curved piece of, of plastic, uh, that makes you then see well.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  But, and, and making them nowadays, and this actually goes back to your original question about like margin. This pair of glasses that I have here right now costs $5 to make.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  $5?

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Okay, what are the ones?

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Not the highest end pair, but, but they work great for me. Now, of course, there are like more specialty lenses. And if you're gonna go progressives, it costs more. But in general, most pairs of eyeglasses cost less than 20 bucks to make all in, right? Like sort of the general purpose ones. Uh, then you can get them to like specialty coatings and specialty lenses, of course. But really the coatings don't cost that much money to, to add. I won't say what, what margin that is.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Don't, don't tell me how much money I just wasted on my pair that I have coming in soon, because, yeah.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, so making the product, making this solution, including contact lenses, is actually very economical, uh, for the, for the manufacturer to do. And, but, but then why is it still so hard to get them, right? This should be unbelievably commoditized.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Uh, and it's not. And the big bottom leg, that's where we're stuck as a humanity is, is, is, as a species, is like getting to the numbers to getting those, uh, those glasses. And that is the next piece that is getting automated. You can't stop it. It's the next piece that's getting automated. It's the next piece that's getting commoditized.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  And, and that's, that's where it's heading, so.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Let's be rude. Let's be rude here. Let's just go for it. So I personally, me, with the current state of, uh, AI technology, I think that right now it makes good sense to have doctors in the loop, reviewing prescriptions in a format that they understand, making sure that it's correct, making tweaks as they need to, viva. Fast forward three years, right? In just another couple trillion data points. Will we still need doctors in the loop? Because that will be a rate limiting step to bring this to 100 million people in the Philippines, Africa, parts of Asia, et cetera, right?

• 57:45Speaker 04

  Yes, 100%. So doctors need to be in the loop. And as it turns out, that in our case, writing great eyeglass prescriptions is, is not many people know this, but it is science and also art. Like, you, you need a tremendous amount of experience to craft well tolerated settings. And that's really one of our big benefits is sort of this hybrid solution where we collect all the data electronically. But we still have that experience in the backend from licensed, very experienced teledoctors.

• 58:26Speaker 04

  But as also as far as, you know, treating goes and finding solutions, I think that will be human driven for a long time. The decision making, the agency, all of that will be doctor driven. Like, who takes the responsibility, right? Like, do we really want a computer program to just make decisions on our care and our treatment? And this is actually a broader question in healthcare, right?

• 58:57Speaker 00

  It is.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  Ultimately, I think that's kind of where the box stops in terms of AI is like, well, who makes that decision on your treatment and care? And I think it will take a long time for humans to give up that kind of agency. And so, yeah, as far as Ibot goes, we're going to have, you know, doctors. We have doctors review every session and deal with every session the same way it happens in a clinic. And I think there's a common misunderstanding out there about how Ibot does it, but

• 59:33Speaker 04

  yeah, it's the, we're effectively just kind of reorganizing the care model. Collection that happens digitally.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just think that for the 1.5 billion people who need them, I think they would rather have a 95% solution than a 0% because there's a chance of an issue. So I'm thinking about that versus like in Utah or whatever. But it seems like all we need is you guys to have a huge commercial success. So you can donate a couple of units, get someone to make the, what's that, Mark Cuban prescription drug company? Cost plus, cost plus for frames and lenses. And then, you know, get some doctors to donate a block of their time every month to review scripts for poor kids around the world. And we could really change the world, but it'll come down to how big Ibot can get. So tell me about what's coming up for the company. New partnerships, kiosk upgrades, what's next?

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have numerous partnerships. Probably more than I can, I can put on my fingers today that we're going to be announcing. And yeah, so there's just a tremendous amount of pull in the market because, you know, there's just simply no doctors available and we are a very practical drop in to solve that, that problem. And that goes for the AI glasses companies and also traditional optical.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  And just before I let you go, you are building in the Boston area. I'm here in Providence, Rhode Island. It is rare that I get to speak to someone who I could drive to in, you know, less than three days. So tell me about building in the Northeast and how the ecosystem is for founders, for venture capital, for just, you know, networks of people that are also interested in the same things that you are.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm gonna maybe do some hot takes here, but the, so overall, Boston is a fantastic place for robotics, for hardware engineers. There's been no shortage of talents in the Boston area and we have a fantastic team. And it's sort of like, once you're in that community, once you're in the hardware community, and I used to work at a company called Forum Labs. It's a 3D printer company. That whole network has been, you know, that Boston kind of network has been super valuable for us and finding great talent and, or knowing people that know people, right? That's kind of how it goes.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  But as far as venture capital goes, Boston does have some good VC firms. But what I would say, and this is my hot take, is that the mentality and the sort of the vision of East Coast versus West Coast venture capital is very different. So while, what I mean is more that West Coast venture capital is very much dream big.

• 1:02:13Speaker 04

  You know, be disruptive, try something radically new. And the East Coast is more traditional kind of capital where you need more proof and you need to have a clear business case already sorted out. And so that's kind of the differences. And depending on where you are or what kind of business you're building, one or the other is better. But for something extremely ambitious as Ibot, West Coast type VC just is better suited.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Well, I'm an Oregon boy living on the East Coast, so I like it either way. I'm just glad to see companies building outside of like, you know, eight square blocks in Soma in San Francisco. A neighborhood that I love, a neighborhood where I used to work. But it's not the entire world. And I think as we think about all the problems that we need to fix, I think we're going to need to have more centers. So I'm glad you're making your footprint in Boston. Maybe you can teach those VCs how to be a little bit more freewheeling with their checks. But in the meantime, Mateus, what's the website? And is there a role you're looking to hire for? You love to shout out to the audience.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we're looking for more salespeople. We're looking for more marketing people. We're looking for more R and D engineers. We're looking for more scientists. We're looking for more across the board, right? Certainly.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  That's, I would say in that order. And

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  our website, yeah, it's, it's ibot.co, so E Y E B O T dot C O.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  All right, well, announce those partnerships and then come back and tell us all about them. But in the meantime, Mateus, thank you so much and go out there and save the world, please. Thank you.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  Awesome. Thank you.