“Yeah, so we're very excited to be announcing our Series F. This was $110 million fundraise, $4.4 billion post-money valuation led by insider investors. And I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. It's a testament to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling.”
“The number one constraint we're facing right now is building more drones faster. The demand for these products has really just exploded over the last couple of years. We a couple of weeks ago announced a $50 million, 3,000 drone order from the US Army. That size of contract is actually not that much of an outlier for us these days. So it's a good problem to have, but we will be tripling production over the course of this year.”
“The number one constraint we're facing right now is building more drones faster. The demand for these products has really just exploded over the last couple of years. We a couple of weeks ago announced a $50 million, 3,000 drone order from the US Army. That size of contract is actually not that much of an outlier for us these days. So it's a good problem to have, but we will be tripling production over the course of this year.”
Capital needs are decreasing despite rapid scaling
“I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. And it's a testament, I think, to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling and even make more and more aggressive bets in building new products.”
“Now we're in a position to use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases. And that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of dangerous work happens indoors. It's where the fixed wing drone that can cover much longer ranges comes into play. And it's a very exciting, fun time to basically take these mature technology building blocks to be able to pretty quickly assemble them into a fundamentally new capability.”
Leaders must maintain high-level technical engineering expertise
“I think one of the things that was certainly true at Apple then is just this insistence on their leaders being exceptional engineers themselves. I remember a conversation that made a big impression on me. I was talking to one of our advisors who was a key senior executive at Apple at the time of like, how do you think about prioritizing sort of like management and leadership skills versus technical ability? And he just said, you need both. Like, you can't compromise. The best people are able to do both.”
Leaders must maintain high-level technical engineering expertise
“I think one of the things that was certainly true at Apple then is just this insistence on their leaders being exceptional engineers themselves. I remember a conversation that made a big impression on me. I was talking to one of our advisors who was a key senior executive at Apple at the time of like, how do you think about prioritizing sort of like management and leadership skills versus technical ability? And he just said, you need both. Like, you can't compromise. The best people are able to do both.”
Capital needs are decreasing despite rapid scaling
“I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. And it's a testament, I think, to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling and even make more and more aggressive bets in building new products.”
Secure supply chains require independence from China
“A year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government. And it was a pretty aggressive action. They announced the sanctions, and then they showed up at the suppliers that we still had in China, shut them down, stop them from doing business with us, really tried to kill us. So that was a fun adventure for our supply chain team. They've done incredible work, and we've been able to maintain supply. And I think the good news piece of this is that we now have by far the most secure drone supply chain in the world, independent from China.”
Humanity's comfort with AI is the biggest deployment bottleneck
“I think, for example, right now, people are massively underestimating the role that human adoption and human comfort, you know, with advances in artificial intelligence will determine its deployment. I think technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt, new technology as it comes out, and I think we're gonna enter a period of time where there's gonna be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming, with AI.”
Secure supply chains require independence from China
“A year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government. And it was a pretty aggressive action. They announced the sanctions, and then they showed up at the suppliers that we still had in China, shut them down, stop them from doing business with us, really tried to kill us. So that was a fun adventure for our supply chain team. They've done incredible work, and we've been able to maintain supply. And I think the good news piece of this is that we now have by far the most secure drone supply chain in the world, independent from China.”
Innovation requires flat structures and high-velocity work cultures
“For the design team in particular, the thing that is probably most important is the velocity of design work. So I typically meet with our designers for a couple hours every week, and we just look at work. I mean, new work every week, you know, hundreds of ideas, I would guess, you know, on a weekly basis.”
Drones are evolving into flying agentic AI systems
“From a product perspective, I think the course that we're charting is towards our drones being like flying agentic AI, just like you have an agent that you interact with on your computer or in the cloud, this thing is an agent that can move and do more for you in the physical world and you should interact with it in similar ways. Like it should have the intelligence and domain expertise to be useful to you in that way.”
AI allows designers to ship code directly to production
“I do think designers feel vindicated in a lot of ways. Right? You know, a lot of designers had parents who were saying, why aren't you studying computer science? You know, what are you gonna do with this skill set, drawing things? You know, this doesn't make any sense. And I think today, you know, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary.”
Distribution is now the primary challenge for consumer startups
“So much of consumer technology focuses on, you know, am I building the right product? Do I have product market fit? Have I, you know, built something that's really gonna resonate, with customers that they're really gonna wanna use all the time? And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about, you know, distribution and figuring out distribution. And that seems to me, to be a huge differentiator.”
Hardware integration provides more defensible competitive advantages
“It also informed a lot of our thinking about investing in other places that are really hard to copy, including hardware, where it's really, really challenging, you know, to copy our our fully vertically integrated stack around augmented reality. So I'm certain certain there's a lot more to talk about, there. But I think, you know, we learned early on that software is easy to copy, and so it's really important to build more durable modes.”
Pure software is no longer a durable business moat
“Fifteen years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a moat, right, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI. But fifteen years ago, because all the software features, that we could create were so easily cloned by our competitors, we started to think about how to build a more durable business, how to build a business, you know, that had bigger and more effective modes.”
Drones are evolving into flying agentic AI systems
“From a product perspective, I think the course that we're charting is towards our drones being like flying agentic AI, just like you have an agent that you interact with on your computer or in the cloud, this thing is an agent that can move and do more for you in the physical world and you should interact with it in similar ways. Like it should have the intelligence and domain expertise to be useful to you in that way.”
“Now we're in a position to use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases. And that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of dangerous work happens indoors. It's where the fixed wing drone that can cover much longer ranges comes into play. And it's a very exciting, fun time to basically take these mature technology building blocks to be able to pretty quickly assemble them into a fundamentally new capability.”
Targeting close friends creates a more valuable social network
“What really mattered was connecting you to the right people. And so if you could just connect someone not to all their friends, but to their best friend, to their partner, to their spouse, the people that they cared most about in the world, that that that's where the majority of the value is in the network. And so that's what really allowed us to grow in those early days.”
“I think a default expectation in five years is if there's an emergency, you call 911, a drone shows up in a few seconds, and that's going to be everywhere in the US, hopefully everywhere in the world. And that's going to change the way policing works. It's going to get better outcomes, you're going to have fewer officer involved shootings, faster response times. And I think you can also do that while protecting privacy and transparency. Like these things are essentially flying body cameras.”
“Yeah, so we're very excited to be announcing our Series F. This was $110 million fundraise, $4.4 billion post-money valuation led by insider investors. And I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. It's a testament to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling.”
“I think a default expectation in five years is if there's an emergency, you call 911, a drone shows up in a few seconds, and that's going to be everywhere in the US, hopefully everywhere in the world. And that's going to change the way policing works. It's going to get better outcomes, you're going to have fewer officer involved shootings, faster response times. And I think you can also do that while protecting privacy and transparency. Like these things are essentially flying body cameras.”
