Why we invested in Wandelbots
…and why it will become the “MS Windows” for Industrial Robotics 🚀
As highlighted in my article “Robotics will eat the world” we at Paua Ventures are big believers in the disruptive potential of automation. Screening hundreds of companies in this sector per year, we have emerged as one of the leading early-stage industrial tech funds in Europe and have developed an extensive overview of all transformational robotics startups out there. One of several unique robotics companies that we are backing is Wandelbots. Having lead their series A one and a half years ago, we just supported them in raising a fantastic $30M series B with a stellar group of new investors that will help us leave a lasting dent in the industrial automation universe: 83North, M12 (=Microsoft), Next47 (=Siemens), Haniel and Alex Rinke (CEO of Celonis)!
This post is to share our insider view on the company, why we decided to invest and why we are super bullish on its future. 🎯
Product: Enabling non-experts to teach robots in minutes
First a few sentences on what Wandelbots actually does: today, about 60–70% of the total costs of ownership of a robotics cell is caused by services around setup & programming.
Programming industrial robots is a highly time-consuming process, requiring expensive and increasingly scarce expert programmers, who have to be trained for each specific robotics OEM’s platform (=ABB, Kuka etc.). The robot’s path is being hardcoded point-by-point, any logic has to be rigidly added, communication interfaces with peripheral devices (e.g. cameras or safety equipment) have to be programmed manually and so on and so forth. The result is mostly a highly rigid application that is far from intelligent and can’t handle any process variability.
To solve this problem, Wandelbots has developed a no-code platform that allows non-experts to teach a robot a new task in a few minutes, instead of days and weeks. Three elements to highlight:
Firstly, the Wandelbots platform is hardware independent, which means the end-user can finally “program” an ABB or a Yaskawa robotics application in essentially the same way and can even transfer skills from one robot to the other.
Secondly, the Wandelbots platform is highly optimised/productised for specific use-cases (e.g. gluing, deburring, painting, welding and inspection). This application focus allows for fastest teaching speeds while not compromising on functionality. For instance, in the Wandelbots gluing application, besides teaching the gluing path to the robot, the user can directly set certain gluing-specific process parameters (such as the width of the glue bead etc.), which then get automatically translated into the right robot trajectory.
Thirdly, Wandelbots is obsessively focused on ease-of-use, developing a user experience more comparable to what we are used to from modern consumer electronics (e.g. Apple, Sonos etc.) than what we find out there in industrial tech (see below). The days are over, where industrial interfaces have to be clunky, hard to use and look like they had the same UX designer as StarTrek back in the 196os.
Team: Commercial obsession meets ingenious engineering and unique culture
Now, apart from its revolutionary tech, what does make Wandelbots so special and allows the company to scale quickly (with customers such as Volkswagen, BMW and Infineon) in a generally slowly-adopting industrial tech market? Well, every good startup story starts with a winning team. The seven friendly folks below, who look like they are posing for the sequel of a “the Godfather” movie 😜, are the founders of Wandelbots. Having seen quite a few brilliant teams out there, in my view there are a couple of elements that make this gang really unique:
- Tech background meets commercial drive: All founders of Wandelbots have a technical background, either holding a PhD or having worked as researchers in the field of software engineering for multiple years. Being a VC investor focused on engineer-led startups, I have learned that overly-academic backgrounds mostly don’t help when it comes to get the rubber on the road commercially and being forced to take 80/20 decisions in today’s fast paced business environment. Contrastingly, this is not the case with Wandelbots. Despite their technical excellence, the Wandelbots founders are united by an almost obsessively high ambition level (“building Dresden’s first unicorn”), extremely fast iteration speed and strong commercial drive.
- Unique culture: Many companies have a properly defined set of values. Few live them (especially top-down). Wandelbots is definitely one of those, being one of the companies from our portfolio that has the clearest set of company values. What stands out for me is the combination of extremely high expectations about everybody’s involvement (“You fight for the company, the company fights for you”) combined with no room for personal egos (“f**k your ego”). Everybody at Wandelbots is continuously walking the extra mile for the company. For instance, in order to deliver on a live demo with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella in Redmond (see pic further below), the whole Dresden-based team was awake and hustling in the office at 02:00am in the morning. Further, roles and titles don’t matter. The best idea always wins. If a team member is better qualified than a team-lead, positions will be switched or the lead will be moved to a different role. Everybody sets their ego aside and acts in the best interest of the company. On the flip-side the company is extremely loyal to its employees and the founders are very loyal to each other. No single person has voluntarily left the company. All founders have exactly the same equity stake, despite greatly different roles, which I find an inspiringly ego-less statement.
- Interdisciplinarity: Most Wandelbots founders actually don’t have a robotics background but are general software engineers. This gives them a very fresh approach to everything they do and makes them not be trapped in the dusty, slow and clunky paradigms of industrial tech. The robotics expertise was added by a couple of industry veterans that joined early-on during the journey. The result of this powerful mix is an obsession with building a revolutionary product instead of an evolutionary one. Every customer request gets questioned, in order to avoid falling into the trap of “delivering faster horses” instead of making something radically new.
Market: Why does this company have the potential to revolutionize industrial robotics?
What Wandelbots is doing goes far beyond a mere simplification of the teaching process! Let me explain two important elements to that:
1Democratization. What many people don’t see is that industrial automation today is still where personal computing was in 1985. Even the numbers are strikingly similar: In 1985, the number of US households that had a PC was around 10%. Today this number is around 90%. What happened in between? Surely the hardware got a lot better, but most importantly in 1985 Microsoft Windows was released, which…
a) was a quantum leap in the world of operating software and, finally, allowed non-experts to make use of a computer in an intuitive way, and
b) allowed apps and specialized programs to be built on top of this platform.
Wandelbots is doing JUST THAT for industrial automation! That is, building an intuitive operating system, with use-case-specific applications and the Tracepen as a novel teach-in device (comparable to the computer “mouse” in MS Windows universe).
The combination of these two elements, is likely to trigger a similarly perfect storm for industrial automation as we saw in the past decades in personal computing. Even the numbers are strikingly similar: today, even in relatively “robotized” industries the average degree of automation is only around 5–10%, while around 85% of all tasks are generally estimated to be “automatable” (=will be automated at some point in the future). Also consider, that worldwide there are still only about 85 robots per 10.000 manufacturing workers. This huge potential of still to be automated tasks is what I call the Iceberg of Industrial Automation. So the real kicker with Wandelbots is not that it allows to save some money on the robotics teaching process, but that it allows a whole avalanche of previously manual processes to suddenly become automated. Because teaching a new robotics application is suddenly becoming intuitive and fast. By the way: good to have you on board @Microsoft 🚀✨🦄
2Platform. VCs like platform technologies, because they tend to have high network effects and can become very valuable. Wandelbots is one of them. Today there is no real “operating system” for industrial robotics out there. By building integrations with close to all major robotics OEMs (and peripheral device manufacturers), Wandelbots cannot only talk to all of these different hardware pieces and transfer skills between them. It can also allow other tech companies to use Wandelbots as a new single interface with state-of-the-art APIs, instead of painfully integrating with dozens of different OEM-specific hardware setups and legacy BASIC-like programming languages (like “RAPID” or “KRL”). Already today, Wandelbots is being used as a platform and is deeply collaborating with numerous third-party tech companies in fields like machine-vision, augmented reality and AI to ensure that every customer gets a best of breed robotics software experience. Finally, every robot powered by Wandelbots will be catapulted into the age of the industrial cloud immediately (=have cloud connectivity). Hence, at the push of a button new skills and applications can be freely transferred to and from it. For example, i can teach an automotive paint-shop application in my Volkswagen factory in Zwickau and instantly transfer it to all paint-robots in all VW factories around the world!
I hope, by now you are equally excited to follow the Wandelbots journey, as I am. If not (or you want to dive deeper and consider using Wandelbots yourself), I recommend you have a look at one of the company’s webinars! Join us in revolutionizing industrial automation! 🤖🔥🎯
To all Robotics Professionals: Feel free to reach out if you want to learn more about Wandelbots — I am happy to tell you more and connect you to the right person within their organization!
To all (future) Robotics Founders: If you (or somebody from your network) are building an exciting startup in the space — I would love to chat. Shout out at any time!
✉️ → georg@pauaventures.com ← ️️✉️
