Unpacking Finance for Robotics Startups| Daniel Kirstein: Robotics CFO, Founder @ Holdfast Partners, Formerly @ Farmwise, Voyage | Scaling Robotics Episode 11

Unpacking Finance for Robotics Startups| Daniel Kirstein: Robotics CFO, Founder @ Holdfast Partners, Formerly @ Farmwise, Voyage | Scaling Robotics Episode 11

In Episode 11, we speak with Daniel Kirstein, co-founder of Holdfast Partners, a consultancy that helps robotics and hard tech companies build their financial and commercial infrastructure. Before Holdfast, Daniel was Head of Finance at Voyage (the autonomous vehicle company acquired by Cruise) and CFO at FarmWise, an agtech company building autonomous weeding machines, where he also ran sales, procurement, and HR. He spent time at Google and TikTok before leaving last year to work full-time with robotics founders. He writes the Robotics CFO newsletter on Substack. Most robotics founders are technologists and don't have an intimate understanding of the financial considerations that affect their business. Software is more forgiving with these gaps, but hardware is ruthless. When CapEx and operational costs are high, it is crucial to understand every single financial lever that affects your business. Daniel has built the capital stack, pricing model, and working capital discipline at multiple robotics companies and now consults founders on doing the same. Daniel starts with the choice every robotics company faces: RaaS, hardware sales, or hardware-as-a-service. He has a clear framework for choosing a business model and understanding how that decision affects how you operate the company. At FarmWise, they chose RaaS, and running it well pushed FarmWise's field operations to a third (!!) of headcount. That same model opens a working capital gap, the cruelest way to fail, where success itself sinks you because orders grow faster than the cash to fill them. All of this feeds into the raise, and we end on what fundraising really takes for a hardware business. Enjoy this walkthrough of the financial machinery behind scaling a robotics fleet! L𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 - Miru Blog (including episode transcripts): https://www.mirurobotics.com/blog - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1xr38bFEhk7MSf8UvmPUBo?si=761aeb03b4464fd1&nd=1&dlsi=fa48d636a0f74df6 - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scaling-robotics/id1857724488 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00:04) – Introduction (00:03:32) – Joining Robotics as a Finance Leader (00:05:26) – Business Models in Robotics (00:07:40) – Choosing the Right Business Model (00:11:59) – Will RaaS Stick Around as Technology Matures? (00:16:21) – The Operational Realities of Running RaaS (00:18:37) – Working Capital and Cash Management (00:22:21) – Forecasting and Cash Planning for Early Stage Founders (00:25:18) – Why Debt Matters for Robotics Companies (00:29:55) – Common Pitfalls with Debt (00:31:56) – What Equipment Financiers Look For (00:33:54) – Raising Equity for Robotics Companies (00:37:09) – Show, Don't Just Tell (00:37:48) – What Investors Push Back on Most (00:40:46) – Advice for Founders Scaling Their First Fleet (00:42:02) – Why Robotics Is Worth It (00:43:25) – Closing and How to Connect

Building World-Class Product in Robotics | Nick Akiona, Principal Engineer & Architect @ Aescape | Scaling Robotics Episode 9

Field Ops is Criminally Underrated | Matthew Lee, Field Engineering @ Scythe Robotics + Aurora | Scaling Robotics Episode 10

In Episode 10, we speak with Matthew Lee, who has spent the last decade running field operations and sustainment at three autonomy companies: Aurora (on-road autonomous trucks), Phantom Auto (teleoperated forklifts), and most recently Scythe Robotics (autonomous commercial lawnmowers, deployed across 20+ states). Before robotics, he spent two decades in automotive repair, working his way up from technician to service manager. I believe that field engineering is the most criminally underrated function in running and scaling a fleet of robots. Matthew has spent his whole career on that side of the problem, and has watched companies live or die (like Phantom Auto) based on how seriously they took it. We get into why sustainment is the function most robotics startups underinvest in, and how Phantom Auto's failure to iterate on hardware in the field helped sink the company. Why field ops works on a totally different timescale than engineering. And how to build a real support stack from tier one all the way up to your developers, including who you should hire for each tier and what data you need to surface when a customer calls in. There are also a few tidbits on how to run your software deployments and canary releases. Enjoy this one, it's a top to bottom analysis of how to run field ops from someone who's experienced the struggle first hand. 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 - Miru Blog (including episode transcripts): https://www.mirurobotics.com/blog - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1xr38bFEhk7MSf8UvmPUBo?si=761aeb03b4464fd1&nd=1&dlsi=fa48d636a0f74df6 - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scaling-robotics/id1857724488 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00:04) – Introduction (00:01:09) – Overview of Autonomy Use Cases (00:03:50) – What Is Field Ops in a Robotics Company (00:05:52) – Why Sustainment Is Critical (00:07:59) – Building a Support System from First Call to Resolution (00:14:05) – Tier Two Support and Escalation (00:20:11) – The Tier Two Agent Profile (00:24:52) – Feeding Field Data Back to Product and Engineering (00:30:49) – Canary Releases and Software Rollouts (00:34:22) – Networking Challenges in Field Deployments (00:38:41) – The John Henry Problem: Operator Adoption (00:42:49) – Advice for Scaling Your First Fleet (00:45:23) – Closing and Where to Find Matthew

The Software Playbook for a 2,000 Robot Fleet | Cem Ersoz, Director of Robotics Software @ Simbe Robotics | Scaling Robotics Episode 8

This Episode In Episode 8, we speak with Cem Ersoz, Director of Robotics Software at Simbe Robotics. Simbe builds Tally, an autonomous retail robot that scans millions of shelves per week, giving retailers real-time visibility into product availability, out-of-stocks, and shelf accuracy. With thousands of Tallys deployed across major retailers in more than 10 countries, operating daily alongside untrained store employees across grocery, club, farm supply, and home improvement, Simbe runs one of the largest commercial Physical AI fleets in the world.We discuss what actually changes when your fleet crosses key thresholds. At a certain scale, you can no longer SSH into a robot to fix it, and that forces a complete rethink of how you build. We get into the difference between 95% autonomous and truly autonomous, why improving 9s of reliability is so hard, and how Simbe ships software to thousands of robots they can never directly touch.Plus, why A/B testing a robot fleet isn't like optimizing a SaaS funnel. There are things that no dashboards can capture, such as whether people actually feel comfortable around a robot moving faster through the store. We also get into what a truly representative canary rollout looks like at this scale, and what Cem learned when hardware he had trusted for years finally failed on robot number 2,000.Timestamps(0:04 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=4s]) Introduction (1:32 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=92s]) Fleet Scale and Deployment (3:57 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=237s]) Lessons from Operating Alongside Humans (6:56 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=416s]) Building Software for Thousands of Robots (10:55 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=655s]) Testing, Deployment, and Reliability (13:58 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=838s]) A/B Testing in Robotics vs. SaaS (17:06 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=1026s]) Supporting Legacy Hardware (22:20 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=1340s]) AI Coding Tools in Robotics (25:28 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=1528s]) Staged Rollouts and Canary Deployments (29:30 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=1770s]) The Hundred Megabit Cable Story (34:10 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=2050s]) Building Workarounds into Everything (36:11 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=2171s]) Hardest Moments in Scaling (39:49 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=2389s]) What Makes a Great Robotics Engineer (43:21 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYiZANXlWI&t=2601s]) Closing Additional Resources * Simbe is hiring [https://www.simberobotics.com/about/work-at-simbe] * Brought to you by Miru [https://www.mirurobotics.com/], RobotOps Infra for Scaling Teams:

The RaaS Playbook for 100+ Factories | Saman Farid, Co-founder & CEO @ Formic | Scaling Robotics Episode 7

This Episode In Episode 7, we speak with Saman Farid, Co-founder and CEO of Formic [https://formic.co/]. Formic is a Robots as a Service (RaaS) company that owns, deploys, and manages robot fleets inside U.S. manufacturing facilities, with robots actively running in production across more than 100 factories and on track to become the largest independent robot fleet in the country. Before founding Formic, Saman co-founded Comet Labs [https://cometlabs.io/], an AI-focused VC fund that backed 40+ robotics and automation companies, then joined Baidu Ventures [https://www.baidu-venture.com/about/] to help run their $600M global AI fund. He's sat on the boards of more than 30 robotics companies, and what he saw from that vantage point is what convinced him to stop investing and start building. We discuss how to align incentives with the RaaS model, how Formic built the three infrastructure pillars — software, operations, and financial — needed to make long-term RaaS, and why pre-deployment scoping is the most underrated part of a successful rollout. Plus, Saman's take on why so many robotics companies get trapped in proof-of-concept purgatory, and what American companies need to learn from China's robotics ecosystem, a question he's uniquely qualified to answer, having grown up in Beijing and spent years investing across both markets. Timestamps (0:06) Introduction (3:25) Why Robots as a Service (7:12) Building the Infrastructure for RaaS (13:26) The Deployment Playbook (18:16) The Importance of Pre-Work and Battle Scars (20:22) 24/7 Support and Monitoring (26:12) Advice for Scaling Your First Fleet (29:17) Why Companies Get Stuck in Proof of Concept Purgatory (33:57) Lessons from China's Robotics Ecosystem (37:52) Closing Advice