This Week in Startups - Decart makes AI faster, Lume teaches lamps to fold laundry | E2166

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Today’s show:We’re back with two insightful new TWiST founder interviews.First up: Dean Leitersdorf of Decart tells us about squeezing maximum productivity out of your GPUs. But it’s not all talk: he also shows us the incredible open world model that can magically transform live footage.THEN! Jason and Alex chat with Syncere AI founder Aaron Tan about Lume, his robotic lamp device that went viral for folding laundry. Hear why Aaron thinks the future of robotics is not necessarily humanoid, and all about his future plans for the Lume arms.Timestamps:(0:00) Alex introduces our TwiST 500 interviews(02:27) TWiST 500 Interview #1: Dean Leitersdorf, CEO and Founder of Decart(04:37) Setting out to build a “kilo-corn,” a trillion dollar company(06:27) How making AI much faster opens up a world of new opportunities(09:48) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠(11:00) Why Dean thinks chatbots are the interface of the future(17:24) How Decart builds and trains its models more efficiently (and for less money)(20:01) Netsuite - Download the ebook CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(21:14) Show Continues…(24:36) Interview #2: Aaron Tan of Syncere AI(25:13) Behind-the-scenes of that viral Lume “robot lamp folding laundry” video(30:23) Stripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on stripe.com/startups.(31:25) Moving beyond laundry: what else these Lume robots do?Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(09:48) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠(20:01) Netsuite - Download the ebook CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(30:23) Stripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on stripe.com/startups.Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Mirage is the only real-time video model in existence today. Even the big tech still don't have it, except for Google. Google does have this, but even the other big tech, as far as we know, don't have this. And it's challenging to build because you have to build a completely different model on the algorithmic side. You're training actually a different model. It's lots of algorithmic mathematical challenges. And at the same time, you have to write a bunch of assembly code for GPUs. Like, all this was written in PTX was assembly for GPUs to actually get it to execute like this efficiently.

This Week in Startups is brought to you by Stripe Startups. Stripe Startups offers early stage venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits, expert insights, and a focused community of builders. Apply today on Stripe.com slash startups. NetSuite. The business landscape is very chaotic right now. That's why you need NetSuite by Oracle. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at NetSuite.com.

slash twist and open phone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. Hey everybody, welcome back to Twist. This is Alex and today we have two absolutely amazing interviews for you. First, we're talking to the folks over at Descartes AI. You may recall that they recently raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation. Quite a lot of money.

What are they building? Well, Descartes got its start actually working on GPU optimization and since then has been working on world models. This comes in the form of Mirage and Oasis. And if that does strike a bell, that's because I showed off to Cart's Oasis World Models on the show last November. I've been dying to talk to the company about what they're building and where AI is going. So stay tuned. It's an amazing chat. And after that, Jason and I are talking to the folks behind Sincere AI.

Don't know that company? Well, you actually do. They're the company behind that viral video of the lamps that's next to your bed and then turn into robot arms and then do your laundry for you. Well, we were really curious how far along is that product? What are the margins? What's it going to cost? When's it coming? And also, what are they going to build next?

So stay tuned because we've all that and quite a lot more from Sincere AI. So first to cart, then Sincere, you're welcome. Let's go. Back in November here on Twist, we took a look at a really cool product from a company called Descartes. It had built a world model that generated a game around you, so you play the game, and then it was kind of making it as you went. I was enraptured by this, just blown away. Now, I'm happy to report that since then, Descartes has gone on to raise $100 million at a higher evaluation and has stayed very, very busy shipping new goodies.

So to help us understand what Descartes is building and why, and to explain what the hell a world model really is, please welcome to the show. It's Dean Lidersdorf. Dean, how you doing? Hey, how's it going? Thanks so much for having me. I'm so glad. Also, you're calling here from Tel Aviv where it's midnight, so you get like double extra credit bonus points for burning the midnight oil here. Midnight is like regular working hours. If I, you know, show you around the office right now, the office is still full. Okay, jokes aside, Descartes does a couple of things. And I wanted to just talk about each one quickly in sequence. You guys got your start doing GPU optimization. essentially helping people that are training AI models

are running inference to dramatically lower their cost. And if I understand, that's where the company started, yeah? The company started at making a lot of money. And that's a good thing to do. Okay, and the way we did it was by saving a lot of people lots of money. You really are good at getting the most out of GPUs, and GPUs are expensive because Nvidia makes a lot of money. There's a handful of products with insanely high margins

that make over $100 billion a year. The H-100 is one of them. By the way, there's only four others, one of them being the Vatican, very interesting, but completely different discussion. Similarly, hard to get your hands on, though. You can't really get the Vatican, and you can't get a lot of H-100s.

There you go. But, you know, next startup will optimize the Vatican. We started off the cart. The card's only less than two years old. First year was really focused on how do we get the most out of GPUs, how do we get them to be insanely fast, insanely efficient from a software level when we started out of the cart, we're idating for a long time.

Like, okay, what do we build? Do we build, you know, everything from a solar panel company, to cybersecurity, to AI for healthcare, and just nothing stuck. But we're honest with ourselves, and we realized that just once in our life, we've got to try to build a kilocorn. So, you know, you have the unicorns,

decaorns, centicorns, and kilocorns. Build a kilo's a thousand. Build a trillion-dollar company. Actually try to build a company that matters. Okay, build a Facebook, build a Google, build an Apple. Build a company that if you look at the world before and after, it's a completely different world.

Now, when you start thing like that, everything starts making sense. You don't have too many options. There's only a handful of things you can actually do. And in our DNA, I think there's pretty much only one thing you can actually do. Create a billion user consumer experience. Now, Chad GPT is the last billion user app out of it.

I just can't. Oh, no. I don't think it is. But so a billion user consumer application, it has to be something then that I'm going to touch every day. It has to be accessible via standard communication devices because you can't reach a billion people otherwise. So how did you narrow down to what to build to meet that standard? Okay. You know, I actually show you something. Let me show you something. Okay, let's do it.

Okay. I'd know if you saw this, but we launched Mirage recently. As you can see, this is Mirage, and you can see the real me, and now you can see me in the Versailles Palace. Or you can see me in a blocky kind of world, okay? Or you can see me in anime. Oh, I don't think that suits you, actually. What about, oh, we can do this. This is one of my favorite ones, okay? This is a wizard's world.

Let me find one second. Here's a pen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. See this pen? See this red pen? Great. If I put it in the wizard's world,

sometimes it becomes a magic wand, you can cast magic spells with it. Okay. I can also change to, say, portal. Okay. And then if I have a shampoo bottle here. Standard office accoutrement. We actually do have a shower here

because I am going to go shower after this before we go to bed because they have a bed in the office. But, you know, the shampoo can turn into a portal gun. Okay? And you can try to launch portals with this. every once in a while it does work. With the next version model, you'll be able to say like, okay, launch portal and then like, boom, it'll open up.

So, Dean, let's talk about what this is. So this is a real-time model that can take a video that you give it and automatically transpose it to a different style, but you don't have to give it a video away for it to process. It's happening as you're using it, which I presume was technically very easy. AI video models to date, they've always taken a lot of time to generate their outputs. You know, you give it a prompt, and then you wait a bunch of time, and 10 seconds, maybe 20 seconds for some model even a minute, and you get something back. Mirage has a 40-misscond delay, like 0.04 seconds, okay?

So the version that you're seeing right now that you can actually play with is it takes any input video stream, any prompt, and just changes it based on the prompt. What we're going to launch pretty soon is also just, you know, generic video generation that's 40 milliseconds in. So you just tell it something and boom, it creates it. So in the case of the real-time usage, but you just showed me with it making you into different forms, 40 milliseconds, is that a lot or a little? Because I know that if I'm playing a first-person shooter in a competitive environment, that's probably a lot.

But for pretty much everything else, that seems quick enough, I think. Exactly. We're also going to be dropping it pretty soon. It should reach like 16 milliseconds a month from now. Okay. And going back to the first topic of GPU optimization, I am just presuming that this does not melt entire data centers. Mirage is the only real-time video model in existence today.

Even the big tech still don't have it, except for Google. Google does have this, but even the other big tech, as far as we know, don't have this. And it's challenging to build because you have to build a completely different model on the algorithmic side. You're training actually a different model. It's lots of algorithmic mathematical challenges. And at the same time, you have to write a bunch of assembly code for GPUs. Like, all this was written in PtX, was just, assembly for GPUs to actually get it to execute like this efficiently.

Okay, so you have to do the hard work of making the AI model and then you have to go essentially reprogram the GPUs to actually be efficient. So technically very impressive and visually, because I love this sort of thing, stunning to me, but I'm curious where you see it finding commercial application. You do have an example up on the site of someone looking down their sniper rifle site inside of a game and I think there's an effect inside of there, which again, visually stunning, but is that where you see this kind of slotting into the economy today? I think it completely take over, like, half the internet.

And I'll explain. What was the previous internet pre-chat GPT? It was basically four things. You had knowledge, which was basically everything under Google's domain. Second category that you had was creativity. What do you do when you're not doing your homework? Okay, and that's, you know, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. Then you had communication, WhatsApp, I message, and you had shopping.

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no missed calls, no missed customers. Chatbots have completely taken over the first portion of the internet. It's gone. The knowledge portion. The knowledge portion, exactly. I don't know who will win if it'll be opening I or Gemini or XI, whoever, but chatbots are the way humanity is going to access knowledge and you're going to create knowledge going forward. That's it. Well, and it is done. Shopping, I think, we'll be split in two. You're not going to browse Amazon.com or Shopify.

Your chatbot is going to tell you, hey, look, here's something cool or, you know, try this on or whatever. Messaging, completely different topic. I can get into it, but I do think chatbots will take over that as well. And we'll left over with creativity. Which is a quarter of the prior Internet going by one of four categories. It is the largest. And the nice thing is that as we get more productive and we spend less time

doing our work, it's the only category that's growing, that fundamentally has to grow. If we now have to do four days a week of work or three days a week of work as bots start, you know, bots start, you know, making us more productive, we're going to have more and more and more creativity time. What's going to completely change your experience when you're having fun? That is, I think, the biggest open question today and the consumer internet. Someone is going to answer that question in the next year. And who's, Whoever answers that question is going to be a trillion-dollar company. So to me, what you're describing sounds like a new world that we inhabit that is persistently drawn by, I mean, perhaps something along the lines of your OASIS model.

Exactly. And that's where we get to what a world model is. That has an incredible ability to look at a bunch of videos and get how the world behind them works. And then just let you come up with completing new worlds. for the first time, we can take what's in our mind and just instantly show it to ourselves and to others and really have a completely immersive experience. No, I love that.

Now, what you're describing to me still feels relatively single player because the entertainment or consumption portion of the internet that we described, Netflix and TikTok and so forth, mostly consumption, not as much creation. It's a single player experience. What I think you're kind of talking about, though, feels much more multiplayer, as in you and I are doing this together. So are you and I sharing down the road when we're working towards a billion people and a

kilo corn or whatever it was. Are we together or are we still apart in that world? You know, something mine, so, you know, we just put up the Mirage demo three weeks ago, and we've been mined alone by what people do with it. And what blew us the most was that people actually did physical experiences together. So we had so many people just took out like broomsticks and started hitting each other. And they put like a Star Wars prompt and it just turned into lightsabers. And hitting each other with broomsticks.

Suddenly becomes, you know, an okay thing to do when the world sees it as you guys having a lightsaber fight. I really think it would be mind-blowing to see if it creates a new reason for people to hang out in person. And just have some physical combined joint interaction and have the AI cast. that into a different world. Did you ever play with Microsoft's HoloLens headset? No. We do have the Quest 3 and the Vision Pro here, but not the HoloLens. HoloLens blew me away.

So I used to be a Microsoft Beat reporter, so I just covered the company. And I got invited up to Redmond for the HoloLens first day. Like no one had knew this thing existed. And I was playing, I put it on. And suddenly, I could play a game that was on a tabletop that was real, but the assets were digitally drawn on top of it. And I like, you know, push a little, it was kind of a Minecraft-ish game like everything is at that level.

And I kind of like push blocks through tables and got to interact digitally and physically at the same time. And I've never quite forgotten how straight up magic that felt. So I do think there's a point of synthesis. I think it's actually more of a physical form factor question than it is how does the software work? 100%. I think it's a physical form factor. Something that blew our minds with Mirage.

Do you know how many hotels reached out to us? Hotels! Hotels reached out to us and said, can we stick this in our lobbies? Oh, as a game. Exactly. As like a new game and new experience. They're like,

can we just stick this in our lobbies? They will put up a big TV screen and a nice camera on top and people will just walk by and be like, huh, I'm in Frozen right now. And use that as a gateway to you arrived at your vacation. Imagine like you're going to resort in the Bahamas. And so you walk up in front of the screen

and you're all sweaty after your flight and everything. And suddenly, boom, you're, you know, and your beach shorts and everything's sunny. And we're like, huh, we never imagine that this is what people want to do the first week in Mirage. That is surprising. But if I was in a Las Vegas hotel, I would put you in a James Bond-style tux with a martini

and a sack of roulette chips, for example. Or if I was in Russia, maybe a funny hat or whatever it is. I like that. But there's several steps between where we are today with Mirage and Oasis. I can see them coming together. I can see the vision. I also think that you and I have the similar optimistic view of where we're going. I guess what I'm curious about is what are the steps in between and are they frequent

and small or infrequent and large? It took us seven months between Oasis and Mirage, because there were lots of key breakthroughs that we had to solve. I think that a year from now, if we have this interview again in a year, will be living in a completely different world. And the answer of who gets to be the AI that you use when you're not doing your homework will probably be answered in this upcoming year just because there's so many product advances

that are coming out based on this tech. Now, based on this tech, are you referring to AI as a whole or what you guys are cooking up in particular? AI video and audio. Combination of AI video audio audio models, real-time is just going to completely... It's going to be incredibly fast, and it's going to also have so many products built on top of it.

So this is a business show. I know it doesn't sound like one so far, but when people talk about building models, usually what I hear in the background is the crackling fire of entire bales of cash. You guys told Fortune that you had burned incredibly small amounts of money, like 10 million when you raised your last round. And usually when I talk to a company that's doing that,

they found some way to have a very efficient go-to-market motion or whatever it is. You guys are doing the hard, expensive thing and not losing money. And I'm just kind of curious, is that going to be something you can keep doing through this process of progress?

Or is it going to get more expensive to fulfill this vision? What's been very central to the card from day one was being able to actually utilize GPUs incredibly efficiently. And we're significantly better than that in the rest of the industry. By doing this,

we're actually able to do what costs hundreds of millions of dollars for other people in order of magnitude with less cash. That's a key fundamental advantage that we have. It is based on the tech stack that we built over the past two years. It is surprisingly hard to replicate. Now that we have this as our bedrock, it really sets us apart

and being just able to operate incredibly more cash efficiently and create new products that other people just can't create. Okay, so you have the right team. You can make the stuff cheap. Things are moving quickly. I guess then the right next question is, what is coming? You've hinted now at new models that are coming the next couple of weeks or months.

So without breaking your own internal NDAs, what should I be looking for from you guys as you work towards this, you know, trillion dollar billion user feature? So you're going to see three things. Okay. From the lab, from the experiences team, and from the B2B team,

from the enterprise team. From the lab, you're just going to see insanely cool models coming out. I can tease one of them already. Imagine in real time, not just Mirage currently changes the entire world. The next version also gets to make local edits. So I can, for example, you know, just be like, hey, give me a sword and then boom, I get a sword without anything else changing.

Give me, you know, a long ponytail. Then boom, I get a long ponytail. And, and, you know, like, make it, like, ninja style hair and make it, like, sleek black or something. And change my entire clothing to ninja. You're going to turn every zoom into an RPG character creator screen. Exactly. The amount of products you can build on. top of this is insane. We're going to build our own like Mirage Zoom, Mirage FaceTime, Mirage Snapchat,

Mirage YouTube, everything they currently imagine just with, hey, let me just change the entire stream in real time. So is that one app? Because you could do, you could do Zoom and WhatsApp and everything else as a combined experience that is multi-platform or as a multi-part product. So what are you thinking? Despite what they may say, no one has a crystal ball. No, no can predict the future. And even me, no shrikanis, I make mistakes now and again. But what you can do is future proof your business with NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one enterprise resource planning tool, ERP on the market. What's ERP? Well, it's going to bring together every facet of your business into a single unified platform, accounting, financial management, inventory, everything in one

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We're going to be launching this in a combination. So a lot of it's going to be combined into one. Some of it will be standoff. For example, gaming. Gaming makes sense as its own gaming platform. We're going to be launching mods for some of the popular games. For example, you can install a mod and boom, change your Minecraft world into Frozen. So we're going to, we're going to see gaming platforms. we're going to see social platforms. We have lots of products that we're going to launch very soon, surrounding, built on this tech that we're creating. And the last part is we just had so much inbound

for enterprise usage for this, from the entertainment space, from the education space, by the way, teachers love this. They can, you know, just turn their entire classroom into safari or to dinosaurs or whatever. School has changed since I was there.

Teachers are looking for something to keep kids engaged. You know, something might, mind-blowing that happened, hospitals reached out. One hospital reached out and was like, you know, a big problem with kids' hospitals is that, you know, when you do procedure on a child, they're scared and, you know, they're uncomfortable. And so they try to distract them. And they showed the mirage and the kids were just like captivated by it. Like, holy shit, look at what happened to me. I turned into something super cool.

And the hospitals, the doctor was just able to do whatever they need. Dentist office. my spouse is a physician who is also a pediatrician. So this is very apropos to the world that I'm right next to. So I can see the absolute demand for that. So many different domains that we probably can't even imagine where it begins, but we can see where it ends. But we can see where it begins.

And so you can see all three things. You're going to see new models, new consumer experiences, and new enterprise applications. And then it'll be quite a ride. We have a few amazing weeks coming up. Okay, Dean, we've already gone way over time. So I have to kind of wrap us up here. But being very honest, I saw what you guys built.

I left it. I saw that you raised $100 million, I think of like a $3.1 billion evaluation. And I went, huh, now I get it. There aren't that many companies apart from maybe OpenAI that are thinking this expansive and long term. And if you're right, cool. And if you're not, cool. But I mean, at least you're taking a swing big enough that you might smack the moon.

So I'm here for it. Once in your life, you got to give it a shot. Either it works or you had the best ride you can possibly have. All right. Tell people where they can find Descartes on the internet. And if you have a role, you're having a hard time filling. Shout it out so the world can gather around. So we would love for you guys to visit decart.ai or Twitter accounts, TikTok accounts, all our socials.

the best role that we have to fill right now, we have insanely talented people, the most talented young marketing person possible. And you can't have a nice marketing degree. What you need to have is insanely creative TikTok or Instagram or YouTube short skills to just be able to take this visual tech that we're building and show the world what it can do. All right. Well, Dean, thank you so much. And we'll have you back not in a year. It'll be sooner than that because I'm sure it's going to be to talk about, but I appreciate you very much. Go have that shower and get some rest, man. Talk soon.

Good night. A couple days ago, there was a big viral video on Twitter of a couple of lamps that turned into robotic arms and began to fold clothing. Everybody hates doing laundry. Everyone loved this idea. Many questions about what it can be used for and where it is. But to help us explain all that and more, let's welcome Aaron Tan from Sincere AI, the company behind the Loom Robot Lamp.

Aaron, hey. Hey. Hey, how's it going? and thanks for having me. I saw the video and I thought immediately and we'll play the video now while I'm talking.

Number one, this is AI generated. It's not real. It looks too insane to be real. Please confirm with me that what we've seen here

is a real video. It's not an AI generated video but it's also not a real video either. It's a render of our design. Yes. Okay. So this is a render.

That's because it felt a little like too perfect. So you're making these lamps with these precision clips on them. We're playing right now. Explain to me why you chose as an entrepreneur this specific design. And these calipers at the end, if I could call them calipers, they look like calipers, pinchers. And, you know, you have to have an initial use case. You want with folding laundry. and with this specific design, it's iconic, it's quixotic.

Why this? Right, yeah. I mean, when we start this company, our main goal was to get rid of chores for people. So we wanted to build robots to automate those things away, right? But as we, you know, we started at the beginning of the year. And as we worked on this idea of just like robots to automate chores, the thing that we learned over the time was that nobody actually wakes up and asks for robot.

People just want a way to get rid of their chores. And no one really wants their home to look like a factory with these free roaming industrial-grade machines that poses kind of like safety and privacy issues. So essentially like one thing led to another and ultimately we came up with this idea where it was like, and thanks to Beauty and the Beast as well, that was one of the main inspirations.

Oh, right, Beauty and the Beast had like the candelabra, the teac. Yes. Amazing. Wow. Yeah, yeah. So one thing led to another, and we basically just came to a realization that, you know, we want to get rid of chores for people, but we want to do it in a way where it doesn't feel like we're adding robots to your home.

Got it. And the best way to do that is to hide robotics in plain sight and have them work in this sort of ambient background manner where you don't realize there's anything really there. That's why they, when they're at. rest. They're just gorgeous, well-designed lamps. Got it. Right. When will you deliver this? And at what approximate cost? Because I think you're taking pre-orders. Yes. Yes. So we have a pre-order list now. The majority of the people on the wait list will get theirs 12 months from now. But we've sort of started this new, like, early beta tester club. And we're going to get the units to those folks

within six months. Amazing. Proximate costs for a pair of these. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody wants to know. Price is somewhere between $1 to $2,000. Got it. So this is an early adopter type thing. If you were paying somebody to fold clothes for five hours a week at $30 an hour, that's $150. That would probably be a family's close. So if I were to look at it to get rid of that chore, if I was paying somebody to do it, which is the people in this benchmark, Alex, $150 a week of savings.

for five hours of laundry, which I think is what a family of five might do. Yep. Pays for itself in 10 weeks. Is that about what you're thinking, Aaron? Yep. That's, yeah, exactly. How is it so cheap? I thought it was going to cost me five.

And then I was going to have to do the math Jason just did. But if it's $1,000, I kind of feel like it's almost an impulse buy. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're trying to push it as sub-2000 is what I've said on the internet. We're trying to get it as low as possible. the first batch is probably going to be closer to $2,000. Okay. Yeah.

But the bomb on something like this, I'm guessing, is 80% of that cost, right? This isn't super expensive, but the first iterations you'll break even at while you refine it is kind of as an entrepreneur the plan? Yes, yes. Okay. So, go ahead, Alex. Oh, I was just curious, you know, what do you guys are going to work on next? Because I have a list of chores that I hate doing. And I could write it down for you.

It's quite long. So once you figured out the laundry side of this, I presume since your AI, your company is not going to stop at just folding stuff in my bedroom. So what's the next robot that's going to come out? And what are you going to hide it inside of? Yeah, I think as of right now, the current plan, at least what I'm allowed to share, is that we want to keep to this same form factor. But it will do more than laundry folding. We sort of envision sort of these are like single floor lamps that you can kind of place anywhere in the home. They have limited mobility so they can move around.

a little bit. And the whole idea is that depending on where they're placed, they can do tasks that contextually make sense in that particular area. Okay. So when it's like in your bedroom, laundry folding it is I think everyone can agree is like the killer feature. But there's like other little things that people have asked for like bedmaking or, you know, even just simple things like holding a knife pad in bed for you all the way up to like massages and back rubs and all that kind of stuff, right? Everything is moving so fast at early stage startups today. It's amazing what I'm seeing people get done.

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to the background massage element of this, and you guys have spoken that those adult, quote quote use cases are off the roadmap, right? Well, I'll say this. We'll have an app store. And the app store. Here we go.

You can get interesting quick. I could not have served up a bigger softball for you, and you just said, no, I'm not going to speak at that. I'm going to go to that. I wasn't even, I didn't even consider your light of questioning. Well done. Oh, wow.

Yeah, no, it's got, it's grabbing hands in bed, Jason. I mean, there's things that people are going to do with it. But people have said that, you actually said that there's going to be over-the-air updates to this thing. So it's going to get smarter after I buy it. If I get the lamp from my bedroom, can I take it to my kitchen later on and have it help with the dishes? Or it would be a separate device? You can certainly carry it and place it there if you like. But I sort of see this future where people probably have multiple floor lamps.

in their homes, all different doing different things. Yeah. I mean, the way it's designed, you could easily see it by a kitchen island. Exactly. Cutting vegetables. Does it have casters on the bottom where it will move around your space? Like a caster's fancy word for wheels, I guess. Yeah, yeah, it does have wheels and they are actuated.

That's how we have it in the pro type. I think the main thing we're trying to make sure we're doing is that we want to limit how much range of motion it has for safety reasons. I think that everybody in the home should at all times know where the robot exactly is. So there's no sort of like free roaming upstairs, downstairs, into your private space, all that kind of stuff. So wherever you put it, whatever contextually makes sense in that limited range, we're picturing like a meter or two meters tops.

It can handle the task there. How does it see? Because to be doing laundry, it has to be able to have vision and to do other things. But also, you mentioned privacy. and I just realized that if I do have both these lamps in my bedroom, I might not want them to be washing all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's a great question.

This is something that we thought carefully of. The best way for me to show you is we have a sort of an early prototype here. So this thing is designed. The short answer is that the camera and everything that is robotic about this lamp is housed inside the lamp hoods. So only when you give it permission does it then open up, reveal the camera, reveal those sort of robot fingers. So these lampplets almost act as, not almost,

they act exactly as mechanical shutters that some folks have on their laptops or whatever. So only until you've given it permission, does everything robotic about it reveals itself. Otherwise, it's all nicely packaged and sort of contained inside the lampluds. How much did you raise to, or does one need to raise, and what lunatic back this company? because this is I mean

you got to have a real yeah this takes a unique person I think yeah yeah it's a bit unorthodox unorthodox thank you yeah I've you know I've heard all sort of things

you know when we first started pitching this we were like oh we're going to build robot lamps that full laundry and everybody sort of told us like those words don't feel like they belong next to each other But in terms of the race, we're actually still in the middle of the fundraise, hence the reschedule of the pod. I would have more to share on that maybe a week from now. Okay.

Okay. Well, I'm stoked, Jason. I think this is awesome. I think this is exactly what I want to see. I think we've talked about humanoid robots in the show a lot because they're a great idea for a lot of settings. But I also think it's a good point about the house. I don't actually probably have room for a humanoid robot to be bouncing around the house. And we get in the way.

So I, it's for closets for. There's going to be like a, I think everybody's going to have a robot closet where the robot goes to just, you know, tell it to go into the pantry. And it's like, C3PO is going to be in the pantry like, oh, what did I do? It's like, just go, go, go into the oil tank. Remember, it goes into the oil tank and does all his stuff. Have you read MurderBot, Jason, the series? I have not. Murder bot is about a robot that's a, it's a humanoid robot.

and it's just kind of sad all the time. And so it's this interesting story about like a, it's basically a bodyguard robot that has sentions and gets sad. And it's now a series on, I think, Apple TV Plus. But I think we're going to end up with very similar. He has a closet he goes to you to repair himself, which is why it came to mind.

But I think we're going that way too. Aaron, this is incredible. Thank you. What's next? This is obviously one of a collection of robot operating system you're building in App Store. So you're going to have four or five different skews, I take it?

Over time? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's, I mean, lamps are such a sort of a personal thing that I think people probably have different styles that they want that fits different parts of their homes. And we sort of see a product lineup of everything from tabletop lamps to floor lamps to lamps to lamps with multiple heads that could do different things. Yeah. That's the thing I think would be interesting because you have those pinchers. but there are other attachments. So having it be able to go to, I don't know,

maybe it's in its base have five different types of hands for different purposes. Obviously, you don't want to be massaged with. Exactly. That could be, I mean, unless you're into some shiatsu, I guess, or if you're into acne puncture. But whatever, whatever your bag is, Alex, you know, maybe you want pain in your massage. I'm sorry. I'm a really big science fiction.

fan. I'm pro robotics. I love technology. I'm a capitalist. I will never get acupuncture from the lamp beside my bed. That's where I draw. I found it. There's my line, Jason, right there. Wait, you're saying murder bot, editorial director, Lon, Air Director says murder bot's going to become an Apple TV Plus series? Yeah. I think the first season's out right now. What? All right. You learn something new here. All right. Listen, Aaron, continued success. If you're raising, you have my email. If you happen to money at some point. I might want to join this lunatic investor group that you're assembling if you are in fact, or maybe you're just doing this off of profits, which is also notable. But gosh, this is the kind of crazy I'm here for.