#OUTLIERS #1 Startup — Kambria
Kambria is an open innovation blockchain platform that aims to accelerate the development and adoption of advanced technology. The founders started a robotics company in 2015 and are all veterans in startup and engineering fields.
Can you introduce Kambria to us?
I am Tingxi from Kambria. At Kambria, we are building an open innovation platform and protocol that is disrupting what we think about innovation, R&D, manufacturing, and the commercialization of advanced technology.
What inspired you to start Kambria, and what is the vision for Kambria?
We started another company called OhmniLabs about 4 years ago. OhmniLabs is a robotics company based in Silicon Valley. While building the robots for OhmniLabs, we encountered many frustrations, especially when developing the technology for the robot. Since robotics is a very multidisciplinary product, you need expertise from all areas, like software, hardware, electrical, and mechanical. Thus, one of the things that frustrated us a lot was that we had to re-invent many things from scratch. It is difficult for a hardware startup to be successful because they spend a tremendous amount of time, as well as resources, developing all of these fundamental building blocks for a hardware product.
What we want to do is to make hardware more like software. For example, building software is very simple because there are so many resources and support online. You can easily deploy a software product, and we want to adopt that mentality for hardware. We realized that the reason why there are no available resources out there to support hardware development is because a lot of companies, especially big corporations, spend so much money on R&D, but they build walls of patents and trade secrets to protect themselves and do not allow anyone to innovate on that technology. It means that a lot of big technology is locked up in big companies, and we really want to change that. That is why we had an idea of “can we run hardware like an open-source software product like Android and Linux?” That is how Kambria came about. We can develop a platform based on open technology that people can use for free, and also incentivize developers to contribute back using blockchain technology.
The vision for Kambria is very grand. We want to be good for humanity, and make sure humanity continues to progress very quickly.
What is your current bottleneck and why did you choose to join the #OUTLIERS Accelerator Program?
One of the things that we are having trouble with is common to anyone who is trying to build a community, especially a developer community, which is how you get people to join the community in the first place. We wanted to use blockchain because the game theoretical properties of blockchain and tokenization can incentivize people to come on with the promise of a reward later on down the road. However, even though in the technical front we can attract people to do that, we still need people, such as AI experts, on the ground to introduce us to their developer community.
What does “outlier” mean to you?
I think an outlier means someone who doesn’t conform to the norm. Usually, people like that or people with that mentality are willing to take a higher risk for a bigger reward. A lot of innovative technologies that have come out in the last few years that people would just shoot down at the time are now all coming up, because those outliers took that risk and went down the road that nobody else was willing to go.
Do you see Kambria as an outlier?
Kambria is a perfect outlier, because we are trying to turn the heat on what people believe innovation is, while all the other companies are trying to protect their product development for profits. Kambria is releasing its IP. By putting it out there, people will come and build even greater technology from it. I think just that kind of mindset puts us quite out there.
Kambria’s website: https://kambria.io/
Interview video: https://youtu.be/2HxCaxt65hI
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