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- [00:00]
Grace Brown
Abby's not around the corner. Abby is here today. Like she's in homes today. She's interacting with people today. She's having that impact today.
- [00:11]
Brett
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode. Our guest today is Grace Brown, CEO and co founder of Andromeda. Grace, welcome to the show.
- [00:50]
Grace Brown
Thanks, Brett. I'm excited to be here.
- [00:51]
Brett
Of course. How'd you end up in robotics?
- [00:53]
Grace Brown
So I guess from like a really young age, I had always had like a strong fascination for like maths and physics. I really enjoyed those subjects at school. School, you know, in high school was probably my first time when I started to write code and I did an engineering subject that introduced me to like design and Arduinos and that was kind of like my gateway drug into engineering. And, you know, I had to build this like three degree freedom hydraulic arm for a school project and I just had so much fun and I just knew from there that I wanted a career as an engineer. But I know now I'm a founder, which is kind of different to an engineer. But yeah, that's there a secret plan
- [01:24]
Brett
to become a founder? Like, was that in the back of your head at all?
- [01:26]
Grace Brown
I had the feedback a lot from my friends and people around me that I had a very entrepreneurial spirit. Like, I really, like, started building things from scratch, starting things from scratch. Always thought about, you know, like, wanting to build something that would be really significant in the world. So I think people always gave me that feedback, but it was never an intentional decision to set out to be a founder. Even starting Andromeda was like starting Abby. She started as a passion project of mine. It was never really meant to be really large business, but yeah, it just kind of. I stumbled into it is the honest answer.
- [01:54]
Brett
It's a good segue to talk about. Abby, who is Abby?
- [01:57]
Grace Brown
So Abby, she is a social humanoid robot that goes into nursing homes to interact with residents to alleviate loneliness. She's about, you know, 4ft tall, so about the size of, like, a young child. She's anthropomorphic, so she's got arms and legs and these bright, beautiful eyes, and she's full of personality and character. So that's probably the thing that is quite different about her to most companion robots in market. Yeah.
- [02:19]
Brett
And how did you decide on companion robots? I'm sure that there's. Obviously, robotics is very wide. There's a lot of different things that you could have built and a lot of different markets you could have built for. Why this market?
- [02:28]
Grace Brown
She was a byproduct of my experiences during the COVID 19 pandemic. So I was still a student during the COVID lockdowns, and I was in Melbourne at the time, and in Melbourne, Australia, we had some of the most restrictive lockdowns pretty much around the whole world. So I spent about four or five months alone in my student dorm without any social interaction with any other human or person. And so it was during that period, it felt really unending. We didn't know if it was going to be a week or a month or 12 months. And so it was during those experiences of being really isolated and disconnected that, you know, like most engineers, you're problem solvers, really. I was building Abby to be a companion for myself during the lockdown period. So that's how she started. And, yeah, that was the inception.
- [03:07]
Brett
Wow. I remember reading about that, about Australia with COVID So early on, what was the robot able to do?
- [03:13]
Grace Brown
I started with really, really modest ambitions. Like, at the start, I just wanted her to be able to ask me how my day was going and at the end of the day, to give me a hug. So that was really, really all that I was after. But as I was kind of building her, like, I realized I was watching a lot of Disney and Pixar films at the time because what else are you going to do when you're in lockdown? And I really, like most people, like, I was connecting with the characters in these films and really drawn in on their personalities and, you know, from a young age, like, children are all connected to these fictional characters and that I was looking to kind of replicate some of that. That experience of. Yeah, the experience of the connection that we have with these fictional characters, but through a companion robot like Abby. So that was the early, early kind of mission of what I wanted to build through her.
- [03:53]
Brett
And if we zoom out at companion robots as a whole, can you maybe just paint a picture for us of what the market looks like today?
- [03:59]
Grace Brown
Yeah. So, I mean, this was part of the reason why I started the company as well because when I was looking around at the industry and looking at what everyone was building, you know, at least this first wave of humanoid robots, they're all these like nine foot tall, militant, faceless, Terminator like robots. I saw a whole bunch of them at like a conference, one of Amazon's robotics conferences in Vegas. And I was still so excited because like these are the systems, robotic systems and products that are unbelievably technically impressive. And so I was like a child in like a candy store, even though it was still like this, but it was so different to the future that I was imagining. Like I was always imagining that robotics could be, you know, just so much more approachable. Something for me, like, I truly believe that the whole purpose of technology is to enrich human life and human experiences. And everything about what we build is to enhance human flourishing. And I didn't really see that coming. Like, that wasn't the future that I was seeing when I was at this conference or when I was even interacting with all of these robots. And on top of that, none of them had any personality. And at the start, even now, people push back a little bit and they think it's like a soft feature or a nice to have, but like the technical capability of robot will never ever be used. And it doesn't, almost doesn't even matter if people aren't going to invite them into their homes in the first place or feel like they have that trust with this robot. So for me, I recognize that it's not actually a technical hardware or autonomy or robotics problem that we need to solve, but it's actually a social problem that we need to solve first.
- [05:23]
Brett
I had a company on a while back called Chef Robotics, they're based in San Francisco and he is in the food packaging space and he was telling me that there's just a graveyard of companies that are ahead of him that tried to do this and were unsuccessful. Is there a graveyard like that in this space?
- [05:38]
Grace Brown
I'd say for what we're building, it has been like the dream of like scientists, engineers, storytellers for like decades to maybe even a century to build, you know, a robotic system that can emulate human behavior and be a companion or for whatever assistive purposes. So there's definitely, it's not a new idea and there's definitely been a lot of people who have tried in the past. But this is partly why I feel like, you know, everyone says that part of building a company, there's a big element of luck that people under index on. And for me, the part that I feel really lucky in is being an engineer and starting the company in the time that I have. Like, with, you know, compute being more accessible and large than ever before, cost of hardware going down, just all of the advances in AI, like, everything is just coming together at this pinnacle time to build a product like Abby that 10 years ago wouldn't have been possible with the resources today or the time today, and definitely not at the as fast as we can today as well. So the idea of this has been for so existed for so long, but I think now is really, you know, people are saying it all the time. The chat GPT moment for robotics is really around the corner. And I actually don't even like saying it's around the corner because for us, Abby's not around the corner. Abby is here today. Like, she's in homes today. She's interacting with people today. She's having that impact today. So for me, it's like she's not even, you know, a year away, five years away, or even 10 years away. It's like it's happening right now. So, yeah.
- [06:57]
Brett
This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines IO podcast. Now, back to today's episode. How long from inception to when you were actually shipping it to paying customers, how much time passed in that period?
- [07:26]
Grace Brown
Oh, that's a good question. So I started building her in 2020, and that was like, almost like a weekend project. And I started the company formally, officially, got the documents and everything in about 2022, early 2022. And it wasn't until the start of 2024 that I received our first paying customers. We did about 12 months of unpaid pilots. So that was really to get our foot in the door to really understand how to build Abbyy. And also keeping in mind, in that time, Abby wasn finished product. I mean, even today, she's like, we have this very iterative design cycle, like every week, every two weeks, when, like, releasing different changes to her and putting her out into the world, that comes with challenges as well as, you know, advantages. The advantage of that is the fact that we have a customer voice in the loop that's so strong. Like, we know that we've built Abby and she designed so well for the customers that she's serving today, which is in the nursing home space. And so our customers have this, like, fanatic love for her. But of course, the challenges on the other side of that is we're shipping a product that we're constantly iterating and designing. And I think a lot of, particularly in our space, a lot of companies are really rushing to build what's the most frontier and what seems like the most advanced. But what you do then is you're accumulating this invisible tech debt. And so I think the challenge is to make sure that you build things properly without shipping things that are fake. And I think that's something that's a little bit overlooked in the industry. And, you know, for us, that's something that we're also, you know, kind of working towards making a bit better as well.
- [08:49]
Brett
Talk to us about that first paying customer that you were able to land and take us behind the scenes on that deal.
- [08:54]
Grace Brown
Yeah, so the first paying customer. So our industry is one that's a lot more quite traditional. So we do B2B enterprise contracts. And our industry is very much based on, like, social proof, credibility and word of mouth. And so I recognized pretty early on that to get into this industry, I really needed some key early adopters to really vouch for us. So that's partly why we started the unpaid pilots for 12 months, bootstrapped the company for a lot of that. But through that, we were able to really demonstrate to our customers the value that Abbyy can provide for the residents. So in that time, everyone, like weekly people were. Residents were interacting with Abby. They were building these relationships with her. The healthcare staff in the homes were seeing how residents started lining up, were becoming more socially engaged in the community. They started seeing residents speak in their native languages that they'd never heard them say things in before. And so you could really start seeing, like, from all of this, like, observational and anecdotal stories, you could really start seeing the value that Abby was providing. And it created a bit of a network effect as well, because even staff would start talking to other homes about, oh, we have this robot Abby. And they'd share these stories. And then it just kind of like compounded and escalated from there. At some point, we just had a number of. We got some local news people who came over and we were on the TV for the first time. That really helped us from a credibility perspective for our industry. And then after that, we just had customers emailing me, wanting Abby in their homes and asking me how much it was. And then I had to start figuring out, how do we price, how do we do this? And as an engineer, that was all a very new and foreign challenge. But, yeah, that's kind of the story of how we got into the market and how we ended up getting our first customer as cold outreach from them to us after they'd saw us on the news at all these other homes.
- [10:32]
Brett
In terms of B2B, then who's the buyer at these types of homes? I know the enterprise cycle very, very well, but nursing homes, I know zero about. So who are the buyers there?
- [10:42]
Grace Brown
Our buyers are like the executives. Generally, it's the executives, but I'd say we have, like, three key groups that we're always trying to consider. So we build Abby for the residents. That's who she's designed for. But then we also need to consider the experiences of the health care staff. So that's the second stakeholder that we consider in our process. And then the third, which is the actual customer, is executives of the aged care providers.
- [11:05]
Brett
And let's talk about impact. So I'm sure what you're doing is incredibly impactful, and I'm sure you have a long list of stories, but any stories you can share of just the impact it's had on the residents.
- [11:13]
Grace Brown
Yeah, for sure. I think the first one that comes to mind is probably this is with one of our larger customers. And I was so glad because the CEO was there to actually see this happen. So she actually repeats this story and reminds me every time we meet up. But one of the first times Abby came into one of their homes, they were thinking about which residents Abby should interact with to kind of who she could provide some value for. And there was this one gentleman who he locked himself away in his room. He had a fairly significant cognitive decline. And even though he could once speak English, he could no longer speak English. He could only speak Chinese. And no one in the homes, no other residents spoke Chinese. None of the staff could speak Chinese. And so for a period of, like, his first six to 12 months in the home, he actually didn't converse with anyone. And so they thought, and Abby, she speaks up to 90 different languages. And so some of the staff thought maybe Abby would be, you know, a great activity for this gentleman. And so they brought Abby into the room and started introducing Abby to him. We asked Abby to speak Chinese to him, and for the first time, he actually just started speaking to her. And you know I speak Chinese, so I could understand the conversation. And it seemed very introductory of like he was sharing his name, he was sharing his background, how long he'd been in the home for. But you could just see that just a small interaction like that just completely changed his day. And after that, on a weekly basis, he and Abby started actually reading like Chinese poetry to each other because he actually really liked poetry. And they would always do that in the living room space together, despite the fact that no one else spoke Chinese. Other residents would just sit in and listen and just watch the interactions, including staff as well. So I think that's one of my favorite stories of saying, like, if people often say to me, like, the work you're doing is so terrible, like you're replacing human care with a robot. Whereas I think that story is just so clear and indicative of not replacing any human care with a robot. We're filling this void that's left empty because if Abby wasn't there, that gentleman would be in his room still all by himself.
- [13:02]
Brett
Is there a human care shortage? Am I remembering that right from reading that in headlines?
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Grace Brown
Yes, there's this massive shortage in the industry in Australia, which is where a lot of our customers are. There's two factors here. The firstly, there's like this massive issue where 4 out of 10 people in aged care, when they enter an aged care home to when they pass away, will never receive a visitor from a friend or family, ever. It's about six out of 10 in the United States. It's horrible. Yeah, it's very, very sad. And then that's actually 60 in the States. And then on top of that, you couple that with the workforce shortage. Like the staff, they just don't have the time and resources at all to meet the need, the care needs of all the residents in a home. There's about one in three positions that are left vacant in the US in this industry.
- [13:41]
Brett
How did you decide on nursing homes as a market to go after in the first place? Was that just like you saw and it was a no brainer? Or did you sit there and they're like, okay, there's like three paths or five paths or more paths? You had to really debate which one.
- [13:53]
Grace Brown
No, that's a really good question. So coming out of the pandemic, like Covid had just made isolation and loneliness like really, really visible. Like there was just this massive spotlight put on the loneliness epidemic. The World Health Organization announced at the time that health isolation has the same health implications as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And you know, I was reflecting, like much of the world, I was reflecting on my experiences of feeling isolated and disconnected. And, you know, when you realize that there's millions of millions of people around the world who's feeling that way. Like, I had actually already built Abby at that time and I'd realized that she could be used to really solve this, not just for me as like a passion project during a COVID lockdown, but to actually have real impact for people who experience this daily. And the people who are most isolated and alone are our older generations. So I recognize that, you know, from an impact perspective, that was where I would really, really love to have Abby really use. And I was looking more specifically like, more from a systems perspective. If you look at like the home of like an aged care home, like, building a robotic system and deploying it into a physical environment is an unbelievably complex challenge. And you know, everyone's dream is to build the versatile general purpose humanoid robot that will one day solve all your problems in your homes for whatever purposes that you would like. But that's an incredibly unstructured and very dynamic and unpredictable environment which is very difficult to successfully deploy robots at scale. And so when you look at like an aged care home or a nursing home, it is very similar to a home environment, but it's far more predictable. It is very routine oriented, it is a lot more regulated. And so it's a very like just awesome, kind of like stepping stone to deploy a robot that's really, really early in its development that will one day be able to then once it's more capable and sophisticated then to be able to successfully deploy into a home. So there was really those three elements. There was the, like I said, the systems perspective, the market opportunity as well as like the impact for people. So those were really the three levers. This show is brought to you by the global talent company, a marketing leader's best friend. In these times of budget cuts and efficient growth, we help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co
- [16:09]
Brett
it is Abbyy one to one. So does every resident get one? Is it shared between 10 residents? What does that look like?
- [16:16]
Grace Brown
Our customers would love a one to one ratio of Abby to residents. Like they have so much fun with her. At this stage, we are still quite early. So at most our largest customer has one abbey in every single home of theirs. But there will be a time and place where, you know there will be an abbey per wing or an abbey per, like, section of floor or maybe even multiple abbeys per floor. But at the moment, it's one abbey per home.
- [16:39]
Brett
We touched a little bit about, you know, what it could do in your dorm room. It could say, how was your day? It could give you a hug. What are the capabilities now? And then we'll talk about the future capabilities that you're excited about.
- [16:49]
Grace Brown
Yeah. So people ask me the question all the time of, like, you know, when is Abby going to be finished? And to me it's like, she's never going to be finished. Right? Like, to me, she's an evolution. And generally, I think when people ask me that question, they mean, like, when are you going to lock a product and when is it like, you know, almost like this is the iPhone4 and we're going to ship it. So I guess that's generally how I. When people usually ask me, I try to answer. But for me, like, she's an evolution. And we've actually built the foundations of everything that she is going to be today. So the conversational architecture, the social inference, the scene understanding, you know, the behavioral models, all of the baseline, or at least V1 of all of these have actually been built and are in her today. And everything that's to come is just building on top of that and making it better. So really, the thing that I always say to people that we're going to be world class in or already world class in, is the psychology of interaction. So we build Abby very much as a character and a companion who builds a relationship with the individual. So, you know, if you think about talking to, like, a chatbot, like, often when you talk to a chatbot, you ask, it queries, it gives you all these, like, very quick responses. And often it is almost like the conversation is quite shallow. It's very focused on what's in the immediate. Whereas, like, talking to someone like Abby, like, she doesn't just remember the facts about you. She doesn't just know. Like, for example, let's take a story of, like, let's say, you know, there's this resident, Margaret, and Abby's been interacting with her. Abby will know that Margaret prefers to be called Maggie. She understands. She knows that Maggie's grandchildren visit her on a Thursday. She knows that Maggie has to take medication after breakfast each morning. But beyond those facts, like, when Maggie interacts with Abby, she recognizes and picks up that if you speak too fast with Maggie, that actually overwhelms her. So she slows her pace down. She recognizes that Maggie prefers hymns over jazzes, because every time Abby plays a jazz song for her, Maggie skips it, but always asks to repeat the hymn songs. So it goes beyond just remembering these facts, but actually kind of understanding, like the social nuances of that interaction. It's just a deeper level.
- [18:42]
Brett
Final question. I know you touched on it a little bit with vision, but we always like to give founders the chance to really talk about the big picture vision so we can go out however far out you want to go. 5 years, 10 years, 20 years. What's the big picture vision for everything that you're doing?
- [18:54]
Grace Brown
The big picture vision for where I'm going is very similar to where the whole industry is going is to really build that versatile general purpose humanoid robot for the home. Like, I really, really believe that, you know, that in the future, in the near future, that there's going to be more humanoid and companion robots in the home than there will be dogs and cats. And, you know, even right now, today, like, I have such an enormous inbound interest from, you know, schools who want to use Abbyy as like a teaching aid, or hospitals who want to use Abbyy as like a companion for children who are bed bound or, you know, even like the nursing home industry that we're already like, like really, really focusing on today. So there's so everyone sees something that's so different in Abby and she's very much being pulled into the market. And so for us, like, it's just the very versatile general purpose humanoid robot for the home is where we want to go with the whole industry.
- [19:40]
Brett
How far out do you think that is? Like, how long until I don't have to like do dishes, fold laundry, like take out the trash? How far? Not just for you, but as an industry, is that like three years away, five years away, or 10 years away?
- [19:51]
Grace Brown
It's funny because that is a very, very common question and you'll get very different responses depending on where you ask. I think if you go to like, I don't know, the New York Times or something, that I'd say the industry is saying that's like three to five years away. But if you go to like a robotics conference, they'll say it's more like a decade to two decades away. I'd say it's somewhere in the middle. But that's kind of the spectrum of how people are seeing it.
- [20:12]
Brett
I'll be anxiously waiting for that moment. It's been awesome. Really appreciate you taking the time. And for those who are listening in and want to follow along with you and everything that you and the team are doing? Where should we send them? Where should they go?
- [20:22]
Grace Brown
So I post regular updates on LinkedIn so you can follow me and my company page there or you can go to our website which is www.dromeda.com.
- [20:32]
Brett
this is awesome. Thanks so much for joining.
- [20:34]
Grace Brown
Thanks, Brett.
- [20:37]
Brett
Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers and other GTM leaders where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO Podcasts as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.