Why We Invested in Ghost Robotics: The Future of Automation
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Ghost Robotics. Welcome Jiren and the Ghost team to Prototype Capital!
Coming in, we saw three fundamental truths about the future of automation:
- AI and Robotics could have a larger positive impact on humanity than even electricity did. By handing off the redundant, repetitive tasks to robots, humans are relieved from burdensome work and can instead focus on what they do best, creative and problem-solving oriented tasks.
- Even though hardware will play a fundamental role in allowing robots to interface, sense, and actuate on the world, hardware is only a vehicle to express software and artificial intelligence. Just as the Amazon Alexa physical product is just a tool to commercialize the natural language processing software, so too will software and AI be the driver of the future of automation as opposed to the hardware itself.
- Even though the robotics revolution is near, the barrier of entry is still quite high especially considering the technical background necessary to design the artificial intelligence aspects of the software. There are lots of individuals building mechatronic projects (combining electronics and firmware with mechanical body to create a “robot”), but the purely mathematical background necessary for autonomous software has prevented people from taking these mechatronics projects and making them “smart” and more useful.
Ghost Robotics is the epitome of these trends. The team founded by two University of Pennsylvania Ph.D students along with Serial Entrepreneur and CEO Jiren Parikh has created a lower-cost, programmable and autonomous all-terrain legged unmanned ground vehicle (UGV).
The team has sold their UGVs to major players in the research, defense and enterprise segments (such as Google, DeepMind, Princeton, and US Army Research Labs), have been named as one of NVIDIA’s top AI startups in autonomous systems and have won the AUVSI Defense Innovation Challenge for robotic and unmanned systems.
But what really caught our attention was that the UGV’s were really a means to accomplish something bigger — Ghost’s real vision is to commercialize a software development kit (SDK) that would provide all of the control and autonomy aspects of robotics with a goal of becoming the software operating system that powers every legged robot developed.
We strongly believe in democratizing the AI aspects of robotics so that anyone building a legged robot can simply just use Ghost’s SDK for all the control and planning, dynamics, and computer vision aspects. This will fundamentally allow for legged robots to become significantly more prominent and useful on earth ultimately bringing forth the robotics revolution.
We’re extremely excited for the future of artificial intelligence and our investment in Ghost is a promising start.
Invent on,
Team Prototype Capital
Are you a founder working on building a company that’s changing the status quo by 10x? Reach out to us @PrototypeCap or drop us a line at info@prototype.capital
