The Compound and Friends - Invest in the Robot Revolution or Be Crushed by It

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

On this episode of Live From The Compound, Downtown Josh Brown is joined by Andrew Kang, CEO and co-founder of RoboStrategy (Nasdaq: BOT), to discuss why humanoid robots may be the biggest investment opportunity of the next decade. They cover the rapid rise of physical AI, Andrew's early bet on Figure AI, the economics driving mass adoption, what widespread automation could mean for workers, and why he structured RoboStrategy as a publicly traded investment vehicle to give everyday investors exposure to the robotics revolution. This episode is sponsored by Betterment Advisor Solutions. Learn more at ⁠https://www.betterment.com/advisors⁠ Sign up for ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Compound Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and never miss out! Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's show is brought to you by Betterment Advisor Solutions. Every RAA knows detention. You don't want to turn people away. You don't want to require high minimums. And you want to help clients who are just getting started because that's where the long-term relationships begin. But here's the truth. Those simple accounts, they take a lot of work.

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Lower your operational lift, but keep your standard of service high. All with Betterment Advisor solutions. Your biggest regret will be not doing it sooner. Learn more. Betterment.com slash advisors. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to live from the compound. Humanoid robots are no longer science fiction. They're on factory floors right now,

and the numbers suggest the next few years are when this goes from early adopters to everywhere. Global shipments of humanoid and quadruped robots grew 250% last year to nearly 53,000 units. Goldman Sachs projects more than 250,000. 50,000 humanoid robots shipped by 2030 and a total addressable market of 38 billion by 2035, a number they have just revised up sixfold. One investor saw all of this coming earlier than almost anyone else bet his own money on

it when the entire VC world told him not to and then launched a publicly traded fund on the NASDAQ in May to let retail investors in on the trade. My guest is Andrew Kang. He is the CEO and co-founder of Robo Strategy. Ticker BOT on NASDAQ, a veteran crypto investor who made some of the earliest bets in DFI and then walked away from the whole thing to go all in on physical AI. Welcome to the show. Andrew is so happy to have you.

Hey, Josh. Thanks for having me. How's that for a buildup? Pretty good? Yeah, it's excellent. All right. All right. Now, I understand you also battled Ant Man in the quantum realm or was that a different

Kang. I believe that was a different one. There's also a different Kang from micro strategy itself. You're familiar. Okay. All right. In 2017, let me set this up. In 2017, I wrote a blog post, just owned the damn robots. And it sort of went like mini viral in the financial blogosphere, which is a thing that used to exist. But I was explaining the relatively recent at that time, NASDAQ explosion in terms of people realizing that these companies were on the verge of automating the entire economy and that investors worried about the future should just get long tech. And after a decade in which the NASDAQ 100 is up about 500% since then, I'd say it was one of my better calls.

You've taken that a step further. You have personally and professionally gone all in on robots. Tell us about the origin of your decision to want to do that. Yeah. So the origin of my decision was around two or three years ago. A friend of mine showed me this company, Figure AI. And I took a look at the video. And they were having robots walking around in a lab, looking like humans, just like you see in the sci-fi movies.

And it was like, well, before you would have thought that was kind of crazy. but now it was in the context of ChatsyBTBT, having launched, I think, a little bit less than a year ago. And it just kind of made sense that, okay, these things can probably actually start working now. No way is a pipe dream. But, you know, the reason why we didn't have it work was because intelligence was always the gaining factor. And I think it was kind of a little bit more clear that intelligence, the development of it, was really going to accelerate. And that you could potentially solve general intelligence for robotics in a really reasonable amount of time. not 50 years, not 100 years, but something more like three to five to seven years.

And so that made a really compelling time. So figure AI had, I guess, prototypes of robots, but this sort of predates the rise of generative AI. It's before chat GPT or right around the same time. And for you, that's the thing that unlocks it where you say, okay, I now think this is workable and investable. Yeah, it was late 2023, you know, like January, 2024. or so. And so it was a little bit after a chatchipedd came out. Okay. Yeah. Okay. You've told the story elsewhere.

You talked to a lot of other VCs. You went to your whole network and you were talking about figure and robotics. And you say almost everybody told you not to invest. But then you put in a million bucks anyway. Then you raised that stake to 19 million. Walk us through that period of time. What do you think you saw that the rest of them didn't? And are you very happy to have not listened to that advice, given the rise of robots as an investment theme, you know, within a couple of years later? Yeah. So just kind of like looking at the company figure and trying to understand the total market opportunity of it, it was a new framework that you had to kind of have kind of had to develop because we never had humanoid before. And so there was an established market for,

this that you could look at, completely new. And so, like, the way we kind of thought about it was, well, humanoids are essentially productizing, you know, physical labor. The same way that LLMs productize knowledge work, you know, digital intelligence. And so, you know, if a robot can do anything that a human can do, and it's working 24-7, 365, it never has a sleep, it never gets tired, never takes breaks or complains or quits the job, right? No health insurance.

No 401k match. Right. Yeah. So then your market size is essentially the entire physical labor market, which is something like $50 trillion. I know that's a really nebulous number. It's just kind of like a really big thing. And so it's how much in the perspective?

$50 trillion. $50 trillion is the annual value of physical labor in our economy. Right. It's all the people, yeah, I mean, that are, you know, working, you know, factory jobs or, you know, working in retail environments, but it's also, but it doesn't include all the labor gaps that we have and all the economic value that could be provided by, you know, all the jobs that exist but just can't be filled as well. And so the market could potentially be larger. If we start bringing robots to space, having them in other

environments where it just doesn't make sense economically for them to, you know, have people doing those jobs today. You are different than a lot of people, myself included. I always think like, yeah, robots, 50 years from now. Or a lot of people would say 20 years from now. But you're like a three to five years from now person. And I think that's where you stand out from other people. I think conceptually, we all understand there have been robots in factories for a long time.

The big difference now is that they're humanoid robots. They don't just act as a coworker. they sort of, there's a versimilitude with a real actual co-worker, but you don't think that takes 20 or 50 years. You think that's like right this minute. What makes you confident that that will be the case? And where do you think our audience will look around and see robots next to them the soonest? Yeah, look, I think in 2020, I probably would have been on the same page

and thought that this was something that was more of a moonshot and, you know, wasn't sure if this would be achieved in our lifetime. But when CHAP, GPT came out, I think it was pretty apparent that the slope of technological process was changing quite dramatically, and things would be getting better, much, much faster. And so we saw that jump from GPT3 to GPT5.5, 5.6, right, in the last three to four years,

and that was a huge jump. I mean, these, right, machine intelligences are doing things that are sometimes things that we can't even do ourselves, right? intelligence levels have just skyrocketed. And so I think you can just easily extrapolate to that similar path of development happening for physical AI as well for the intelligence of robots. You have a lot of, you have a lot of contacts in the space, and you've seen a lot more than the average person who's listening or watching us right now.

I think, like speaking as the voice of the average person, everyone's been sent the YouTube video of the dog with no head. head, which is very disconcerting. Everybody remembers when Elon Musk brought one of his humanoid robots to the Kardashian mansion to, I guess, serve drinks at a party. And then the thing that they say is like, all right, the dog looks like a toy and the Elon Musk stunt with the robot. There was actually a person controlling the robot behind the scenes.

Like, I still feel that people don't really believe that this exists. or that they're going to run into one of these. So just to like double down on my original question, where would you tell regular people that they're going to come into contact with these humanoids first? Yeah. I mean, in regular contact, I would say it's probably a few years out from now. But I think you're going to see it more so on the internet

or if you live in specific places like Silicon Valley a lot sooner. I don't know if you saw the Figure A.I. live stream was around one or two months ago that went pretty viral where they had a humanoid robot doing you know logistics tasks sorting packages flipping them over like the same way as human would and it went out went on for eight days straight and i think that was like a little bit of a mini chat tpt moment where people sort of realize this is real it wasn't controlled by a human and right it didn't need to it wasn't some clip that was chosen out of a hundred clips or hundred takes right and that was the one that was posted on the internet but right it was working autonomous

for a long time. Wait, the robot was sort. I've seen that clip, but I watched 30 seconds of it. I didn't watch eight days of it. But the robot spent over a week at that task, I guess. Yeah. They had a few robots changing shifts because each robot after, you know,

I don't know, eight, ten hours, they had to go and charge their right batteries. And there was another robot that came and swapped over. I was going to say they had to go call their wives or pick up their kids at karate or something. But all right. So they have to swap the batteries. But all things being equal, that's what we're going to see in that package sorting role, for example, in like a factory setting or a warehouse setting.

Yeah, package sorting, machine tending, packaging items. I mean, all sorts of things. It's kind of hard to kind of list off everything that a robot could do in these factories because it's just, you know, almost everything a human can do, but also more, right? because some tasks are just too dangerous or, you know, they require too much intensity or strain from a human. That's where a robot can do a really great job. You've done the math on this publicly.

You said a robot doing the work of three humans at roughly $2 an hour versus $35 to $40 for a U.S. worker. At that math, the economic incentive for adoption becomes almost impossible to ignore. So I guess the only real holdup is how fast can you manufacture robots and how quickly can you convince business leaders to insert these machines in their work environments? Like what else really is there that would hold this up? Yeah, I would say intelligent. Sorry. I mean, I would say the manufacturing is the main bottleneck.

The intelligence is going to get there in the next one or two years. If you kind of like take a look inside the research labs or some of these headquarters of human robots companies, it's kind of magical in terms of like what they're able to do. But, you know, we can only produce so many robots per year right now. And to produce, say, a factory that can manufacture a million or 10 million robots per year, that'll take, you know, a little bit of time to get going. So that'll be the bottle. But we're going to solve it in the next, I would say, three, four years. So we're going to get into some of the investments that you're making. today. But just conceptually, is it likely that Tesla will be, at least in the early stages of this,

the first company who actually has the wherewithal to manufacture humanoid robots at some sort of scale? Do they look like they're in the poll position from a manufacturing standpoint? 100%. I think they're working on a 10 million robot per year facility right now, which would be the The biggest one by far. Most companies are producing on the scale of thousands to tens of thousands of robots per year today. So it's a gigantic. Andrew, you've been very honest about what you think comes next for workers, maybe more so than a lot of other people building in this space and a lot of thought leaders in Silicon Valley.

You think that, or you've said, AI and robotics will eventually replace. both physical and cognitive labor, and that perhaps universal basic income or UBI becomes a necessity. Most executives in the space again, they're not saying that out loud. I would imagine maybe they're saying it over drinks with their colleagues, but you seem to lead with it. So talk about why that component of it is really important for us to be honest about. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can't fight technology.

anyone that's tried to fight it in the past they've always lost. And so I think you've got to start planning ahead of time for when that reality hits and people are displaced by this technology. And we can't do it two years, three years in the future because people might be out of jobs at that point. So we need to start working on a plan now for when that moment does come because when it comes, it's going to happen real fast and you don't want to react late. And people could be in a lot of trouble if you are reacting late.

The techno optimists seem to think that there's going to be a boom in jobs we never could have conceived of before happening in the wake of this robotics revolution. And I don't know if that means robot repair. I'm not a thousand percent sure what that means. But I guess there are a lot of people working in jobs today that we couldn't have imagined 20 years ago, like social media manager. So talk a little bit about, I guess, why you're hopeful that we're not talking about. UBI being the way everyone gets paid, maybe just a subset of workers who are the first among the displaced while they try to figure out what they're going to do next? Or is it more bleak than that? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's going to be some jobs that people will move into that

people don't want robots doing, service-related jobs where you want a human touch, for example. You know, maybe that gives a higher level of service if you have a human doing that for you as opposed to a robot. For example, in China, they have the first. food delivery robots in a lot of the hotels, but they don't have them in the five-star hotels, the best hotels, right? Because it kind of adds a little bit of like a less premium service. But at the same time, like, what if you get Android's, right? What do you have robots that are almost indistinguishable from humans and provide even a better level of service, then, well, that's maybe pretty tough to deal with. I think the argument goes like this for maybe some of the technology

of people, which is we've always found like new jobs for people. But the reason why we found new jobs is because we found jobs to do that required more planning or like complex cognitive thinking in some way. And intelligence, AI is not going to stop. It's going to be able to think in all the ways that humans can. And so I don't see that being, right, like a good extrapolation to the future. And, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Like, I robots. So you think these previous technological waves where,

within a couple of years, somebody that used to be a blacksmith or somebody that used to manage a horse farm, then we get the automobile, those people maybe become automobile mechanics. Like that analogy may not hold true this time because of the thinking that AI is capable of doing. And that's the thing that prior waves of technological advance, just they didn't have as a feature. as a feature. It's a great way to look at it because you mentioned robot repair mechanic. Why couldn't a robot do that? You're going to have robots building robots.

Stop. You're taking all the good robot repair jobs. Stop. All right. Look, it's a serious subject. We're laughing about it. But would you say, like, on the spectrum of optimism versus pessimism about what this is going to mean for the average person, would you say you're leaning more toward pessimism

or are you just neutral? because it doesn't sound like you're in the 8, 9, 10 level of the optimists who say, this is going to be incredible because think of all the new industries we're going to create. It doesn't sound like you're on that side of the spectrum of thought on this. Well, I think if we get to figure out the AI, safety, AI alignment piece, then there could be some pretty good outcomes for community. Elon talks about buttons for everybody because, you know, labor is just going to be so cheap. and we're going to be able to do so much as society.

And if we write the right frameworks for letting that benefit, all the economic value benefit people of all classes, then I think we could have a great outcome. But we got to get that right, right? I agree. What would you do if you had the power to enact some sort of plan or program at a national level? What would you do today?

Or what would you start talking about today so that people are, asking the right questions and looking for the right answers to those questions. I think there needs to be more research done in studies. And I think there's been some already around UBI and what happens to society. Once you start giving out essentially government support, paychecks to everyone, you know, there are some societies that have done it in Europe and it's worked out well for them. But, you know, there have been some implementations that haven't worked out so well. But it's also you don't really have a choice.

Because if there are no jobs for people, then what else are you going to be able to do? Sam Olman, I think, talks about universal basic intelligence. But I'm not sure that's a little bit harder to translate because I'm not sure anyone will just be able to turn intelligence into food and housing for themselves as well. So you've probably got to provide that for a lot of people. So one of the models that I guess would be deemed successful is in the Nordic countries where they've taken the oil wealth of the nation, and they've created sort of this prosperity fund

that manages that oil wealth, and every citizen effectively gets a dividend from that. And, you know, it's sort of how they've been able to make it so. They don't have one or two really rich people who have captured all of that oil wealth, and everybody else in the country just looks at it. It's like, oh, that must be nice for them. So it's sort of an example.

I mean, it goes into like socialism and areas that you and I aren't going to go into today. But do you think that might be some sort of a model where the government is involved in robot investments and is able to capture some of that shared prosperity and make sure that it's being sort of universally applied? Or is that more problematic than it is a solution? It seems like the government's kind of going that direction already, right? They've invested in semiconductor companies in the U.S., like Intel. They provided financing for the rare earth's processing companies, and I think it's pretty clear that robotics is next. You know, Latinx been on TV over and over saying about how important robotics is for the country.

And, you know, we've been a little bit behind on it compared to other countries in terms of incentivizing the domestic industry, but now it is a major priority for the government, and you're seeing that with the conversation that are going on with some of the bills that are going through Congress and the Senate right now. And so, yeah, I absolutely think that, you know, having government investment in the industry is important. I want to talk about the structure of what you built

because this is where it gets really interesting for our audience. So you've got a vehicle, which you'll describe to us, that went public on NASDAQ in May. So it still has that new fund smell. The ticker is, BOT, and it's a closed-end fund as opposed to an ETF or a venture capital fund. It's something a little bit different.

Can you explain what Robo Strategy actually is why you structured it this way? Yeah, Robo Strategy is essentially a publicly listed venture capital company that is exclusively focused on investing and needing robotics companies and predominantly private robotics companies. And really the concept is we're really bullish on the industry. we think it's going to grow 100 fold, a thousandfold. We're going to bring humanoid to the market. We're going to invent all these new applications that can be done by robots. But all that exciting innovation is happening in the private sector.

And you saw this with the AI labs. The private markets. Away from a lot of it's not on the stock market. So you're giving people away to own stakes in the private companies that you identify. as being worth investing in? That's right. Yep. Okay.

Okay. The micro strategy comparison is something that you've leaned into publicly. The idea is that, if I have any of this wrong, just correct me. You issue shares at a premium to NAV. You use the proceeds to buy more equity in robotics companies. and it sort of sounds like the flywheel that Michael Saylor first proposed when he began to use micro strategy as a way to do that with Bitcoin. Strategies, NAV, is a live Bitcoin price effectively. Like how, I think he owns, was it 850,000 Bitcoin or something like that.

And so the price of the security is a function of where is the price of Bitcoin and how many Bitcoins does. strategy own. So it's sort of easy to understand by people, and then it'll trade at a premium or a discount to that amount of Bitcoins. Your private company valuations are estimated quarterly, and that's what gives investors a fundamental view into what bot could or should be worth at any given time. Do I have that right? Yeah. So we're actually going to probably start updating it monthly on our website. I think there's a lot of nuance in understanding NAV because it's very different from the NAV of a fund that holds publicly traded assets where those assets are pretty much

marked to market every second or every minute for something like Bitcoin. For us, right, these private assets are marked at the last round valuation or sometimes at a discount. And so what that doesn't take into account is all the changes in the company, right, between rounds. And like a public company, that valuation or the growth of the company is being reflected pretty much every single day. Every second. That's not reflected in the NAV.

And so, right, but if there's a positive element or a negative development, it's not reflected until the next round. And that could be six months out, a year out, two years out. And that's part of the reason why you might see differences from the company, right, that Robo Strategy, trading at a premium or at a discount, and maybe to kind of reflect some of some of that development that might occur between rounds. And there's so and I think you should also understand that private markets and public markets value assets differently because there's there are two markets, they're two different markets and they have a different subset of market participants. And you see this happen all the time more private companies when they go public.

Some of them might be valued more highly when they go public because there are more buyers. There's more demand in the public markets and there are the private markets, right? Which is really a small subset of the total investors in the entire world where the public markets, a subset of almost every investor in the world. And you see this in some public companies where their whole strategy is based on rolling up private companies into their balance sheet. Companies like Transdime or Constellation Software, where the public companies, you know,

the public markets mark them at something like a 15 to 40x earnings multiple. And their whole strategy is buying companies in the private markets that are valued at maybe 3 to 8x that do very similar things. And so they can spend 100 million. And as soon as that's on their balance sheet, now it's 400 million. Right. They've created 300 million. Yeah, it's an arbitrage.

They do that in my industry. The larger registered investment advisory firms have sort of like an enterprise multiple. And so when they go and buy a mom and pot. RIA, that's immediately, like it immediately adds to the value of the enterprise at like three to four X just by virtue of this is now no longer a standalone business doing seven million in revenue. We're adding this seven million in revenue to us. And therefore, the multiple on that revenue is higher because our multiple is higher.

This is a very common thing. So you're doing that in a, in a market where there's less price discovery. there are less investors total. It's sort of like in an enclave, you know, primarily in Silicon Valley or in Asia. And as a result, there's some sort of, I don't want to call it alchemy, but there's some sort of arbitrage where once these companies become part of your fund, all of a sudden, there could be an uptick in what they're worth. Yeah.

And private equity world, right, they call it multiples arbitrage. There's a bunch of terms for it. And we're just applying to venture capital. which is, I think, the first time people have done it in the public equity markets. Okay. Could you update the value of the private companies you're invested in based on shares changing hands amongst private shareholders? For example, you invest in a robotics company and an employee manages to sell some of his or her stock to a venture capital fund or through one of these platforms. and then the value is different from the last round.

Are you able, as the manager of the fund, to take that into account in how you value these startups? Or is that an area where you don't want to go? You'll just wait for the next financing round to write the value up or down. Yeah, right now it's a small component of our valuation framework. Okay. It would be a larger component over time.

What I would also note is that the secondary markets for venture are pretty funny and that they don't act like the public secondary markets. They also anchor to the most recent rounds because people say, hey, look, they just did this round six months ago. Well, money changed hands. Yeah. And then it jumps, right? Like, whenever there's a new round that happens.

That's a little bit of alpha, actually, you know. Yes. I don't think that the markets are entirely correctly priced a lot of the times in the secondary markets. Well, it's hard. Like, take, for example, anthropophobic. So let's say they do a round and, you know, they're raising that evaluation of, this is like years ago, they raised at a $50 billion valuation.

And then news comes out like three weeks later that they got this massive contract with the Pentagon. Obviously, the company's worth more, but there's no ticker and no one's trading it. So the private market knows it's worth more, but until there's a new transaction, hard to set. exactly how much more. And that's a really big difference between public market investments and private. There's a lot of transactions in the secondary market, but the thing is that there's no, like they're not publicly reported. And so there's a lot of non-transparent and egoteness in terms of where these things should actually be priced and what people are buying and selling them at. Okay. So you're being very honest and open with your investors in the bot fund. Hey, these valuations

are going to change rapidly. We hope they'll change positively, but it'll be sudden and we won't know for sure. And I feel like you're, I read through some of your stuff, you're, you're just saying, like, this is very different than public market investments and you should, you know, act accordingly. Yeah. It's interesting kind of navigating this nav framework because it's, you know, of course, we try to be conservative on it because, you know, we don't want to be overestimating our, marks. And the secondary markets can be in transparent and maybe a little bit slow. At the same time, right? Like, we want to be able to provide accurate values. And I guess the public market is kind of doing that in a way by trading these things at a premium. I hope it's something that

becomes more transparent over time. But the NAV framework was just never made for this world, where the valuations move so fast. Right. It was most of the closed-in funds in the past have been private credit funds work, right, the change with quarter. Or they'll own municipal bonds or they'll own, right. Okay. Your three largest positions are figure AI, Apptronic, and Dino Robotics. According to what I read, each represents a quarter of the funds net assets. It's a pretty concentrated bet.

It seems like you want to own a lot of the best and not just sprinkle in a hundred different startups for the sake of saying you're diversified. of course, what comes along with that is increased risk if something goes wrong with one of them. Tell us about those companies and what people need to know, just as far as why you chose those specific investments. Yeah, so one thing I would note is that the percentage allocations are going to change pretty significantly over time. The reason why they might be a little bit more concentrated was because when we started the fund around a year ago, there wasn't as many exciting companies in the space that were, you know, more mature than they are today.

And that's changed quite a big because the field is moving so fast. There's so much more talent going into space. And companies are maturing, right? You know, quarter by quarter. And, you know, in terms of the companies that we've chosen, you know, we focus on companies that have just have the biggest power law potential impact, companies that have, you know, tackling the biggest markets in the world and still even at multibillion dollar valuations, have potential 100x upside, right?

We want to basically find the anthropics or the open AIs of the robotics world. And we also want to be selective because imagine if you invested in maybe a lower valuation like AI company that you felt, because you felt anthropic or open AI was too expensive and you were trying to catch up to them, I mean, you would have probably not done too well because most of them, right, they just kind of got out competed by these larger companies that had more talent, more resources, and just work better, better leadership. And so that's kind of our approach where we just want to bet on the best and meeting companies in the space because there is so much more upside available.

You don't need to be picky. And there's a lot of alpha and being able to differentiate between, you know, the winners and the losers because there are going to be a lot of failures in the robotic space. Okay. So what's the elevator pitch on figure AI? I mean, I would think about them as like the Apple for humanoids. They have the best product. Yeah.

It's not just their chops in manufacturing AI and harder, which I believe they're all top of the line for, but it's also the experience that they've been able to show with the robot, with the videos that they've created. And you walk into the figure office. It feels like you're walking into the future. There's hundreds of robots walking around, doing household tasks or doing tasks in a logistics environment.

And, you know, it's like designed in a way where it's like this is a premium product. If I have people in my home, that's something I would show off. I wouldn't want to show off like a dinky, you know, $5,000 robot that is, you know, like breaking, you know, every six months. What are they going to sell the first model that's for sale to the public? What are they going to sell that for? I think that's TBD. Okay.

Yeah. But we're thinking it's six figures? Or not necessarily? They might have a model that goes that high. I think they're probably going to try to make it more affordable. And I think the leasing, uh, the leasing robot type of business model is going to be popular as well that a lot of these companies are exploring. But that's more so to industry, right, opposed to for the home.

What's Apptronic? Appronics, they were one of the earliest humanoid companies. They've been around for, you know, nine, ten years. And they have what I consider, some of the original innovators in actuary development. Acturators are basically the motors and the joints of the humanoid that basically allow them to move around. And that's one of the most important components of a humanoid or any robot in general. And they partner- So that's a bet on a supplier to the robot companies.

So they make their own humanoids now. Before they were consulting service, and they had actually produced the prototypes from one of the very well-known humanoid companies today. But then they decided, hey, look, we're going to develop our own humanoid now. And so they're developing their own hardware. They partner with J-Bold, do the manufacturing. bringing, they partner with Google Deep Mind and develop AI.

Okay. And lastly, Dino Robotics. What's the bet there? So Dina is a really unique case where a company, like Figer, they're developing both the AI and they're also developing the hardware. Unlike, I guess, Eptronic is that they're doing it kind of entirely vertically within the company itself, but their robot doesn't have legs. You know, they're creating robots that are completely stationary.

They're just two arms or they're on a wheel base. And I think that's a really big market as well Because not every single robot needs to move around to have legs And those add a lot of costs to the robot Right? Most tasks in a factor You're just kind of stationary You're doing the same job over and over and over again It's repetitive and right

For a lot of environments as well You don't need to go up and downstairs Or you know, go across tough terrain right? You just need to be able to move around the same floor Yeah depending on what it's depending on what its job is Not every job requires like mobility on foot. Yeah, exactly.

That's what they're working on. Okay. Last question. You just announced a $36.5 million private share issuance two days ago. Is this, I guess it's not, I want to ask you if it's dilutive, but I'm not sure if that's the right terminology because it's a closed end fund. And ostensibly, you said you're deploying it, like you're going to be making a, uh, uh, an investment with that money, so it's additive even to the existing shareholders of the fund.

But I guess how should a shareholder in bot think about this share issuance and future share issuances as you find new opportunities that you want to invest in? You're going to need capital to do it. I think everyone understands that. Yeah, so we've announced three Budpipe fundraisers over the course of the past three weeks, totaling close to around 100 million. Those were all done with institutional investors that we believe are very long-term oriented,

not selling them into the public market. And they were all done at multiples to the publicly stated NAAV, I believe around three to four acts. So these people believe in what you're building so much that they're paying a very high premium over the actual NAV that you're now. reporting. So that's a sign of a lot of confidence. It was, it was close to the market price of

each day that, you know, we had the pipes. Yes. Right. Okay. Of course, like, we're not, you know, as the largest shareholders in the company, the management team is not going to want to do dilution or issue shares if we don't believe it's massively accretive, right? The value that we're getting from doing the issuance itself, right, at a multiple, plus the value of the investments that we're making and what we hope to generate from the returns has to outlay the cost of dilution substantially. Okay. So if you're a shareholder in bot and you see an issuance, your attitude should not be, oh, I guess this dilutes the amount of exposure I thought I had to figure AI. The way that you should actually think about it is, okay, they must have identified some opportunities and they want to go after

it and that'll be more investment in in this portfolio that I'm invested in. Yeah. That would be the way you want people to think about it. We're increasing the exposure to the companies that people see and want in the portfolio. In the same way, microchratage, you did that for Bitcoin, right? They increased their Bitcoin per share. That's one of the key metrics they look at something between 5 to 10x from when they first started accumulating it in 2020.

And so, you know, hypothetically, if we had one figure share, per robo strategy you share, we hope to increase that by multiples in the future as much as we can so people can actually, right, have more exposure on a person. That's awesome. So somebody that's thinking about investing in robotics and they believe as I do and as you do that this is happening. And, you know, it's something that you can actually benefit from if you place your bets right. there are lots of publicly traded robotics ETFs, and now what you have listed is something completely different because you're able to invest in pre-public robotics companies that have great products,

and ultimately at some point, hopefully, will themselves go public? That's correct, yeah. And these private companies stay private longer and longer. SpaceX, I have two trillion, anthropic open AI, not going public until at least a trillion. And that trend is going to keep going for these private companies because they're just There's so much capital going into this markets. And it's a long process to go public. It was not difficult.

You have to deal with public board and all these other things. And if they have the ability to stay private, most companies are going to choose to do so. All right. Andrew, I really appreciate your time today. Let me just cover both of our asses. Nothing that you hear on this show is ever an endorsement or a recommendation to buy or sell any securities. Of course, do your own research, use your own judgment. if you want to read more about bot and read the risk factors and read about the company holdings,

Andrew, what would be the best place for people to go? Yeah, robosurgy.com or on X, Robo Strategy. Okay, RoboStrategy.com or follow Robo strategy on X. Andrew, thanks so much for coming by. Can we come to you in the future as we see more robots and want to talk more? Yeah, we'll bring our robots in the studio next time, Josh. Thanks for having me. I love it.

Nice to see you. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you guys for watching and listening. Take care. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up?

That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfar. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.