The following interview is a conversation we had with Anand Gopalan, CEO of Vayu Robotics, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $12.7M Raised to Build the Next Wave of Robotics Solutions
Anand Gopalan
Thanks for having me on, Brett.
Brett
Not a problem, and I’m super excited for this conversation, and I’d love to just begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Anand Gopalan
Sure, I’m a hardware engineering by training. So I came to the US like a lot of engineers for my postgrad studies. Got my PhD in rf circuits a long time ago. I’ve been in the valley for a couple of decades at this point, and sort of, I’ve reinvented myself a few times over. So I started off as a semiconductor designer first, sort of half of my career was building products that involved optics, photonics, semiconductors, and then realized that at some point I wanted to do more than just being sort of semiconductor engineer. So started going down the management track, managed teams of people, was at a company called Avago before it became Broadcom, managed worldwide engineering teams in a few different places in semiconductor companies, then again decided that I wanted to reinvent myself.
Anand Gopalan
So decided I want to go work for a system company, not semiconductor. So kind of then joined a company called Velodyne Lidar, which was building lidar for autonomous vehicles as the chief technology officer, and built lidar for all the major autonomous players and robotics players at the time. And then, of course, again, the sort of theme continues. Reinvented myself, decided I was going to prime my hand at being CEO. So I took over the CEO of Velodyne, and then, of course, the pandemic hit, which was kind of interesting. And so we ended up taking the company public in the midst of the pandemic. So took a company public, ran the public company, and then decided I wanted to reinvent myself again. So decided to go back to the ground floor and start a company from scratch and build it up from zero.
Anand Gopalan
And that was the founding story of Vayu Robotics. So sort of theme of my life is, like, constantly finding ways, through new challenges and reinvent myself and do newer and newer things all the time.
Brett
I think that’s one of the hardest things that humans can do, is to reinvent themselves. And it sounds like you’ve done it successfully many times. Talk to us about what’s going on in your world when you start to have that feeling of, I think it’s time to reinvent myself, and then what do you do to successfully reinvent yourself? Because I think a lot of people try it, and sometimes it doesn’t work out.
Anand Gopalan
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a combination of a few things, right. I think I sort of intellectually get bored at some point. And so there’s the desire to not coast. I get very uncomfortable when I am basically coasting, phoning it in, or whatever you want to call it. And I feel like, oh, my God, I’m sort of mentally stagnating, and I just hate that feeling. So that starts. That’s the seed, right? So that gets me going. And then usually I’m also always driven to, like, find something that I’ve never done before. For some reason. That’s always the big attraction is like, oh, I’ve never done this before, so I should definitely try it. And so that’s the starting point. And then I think to some extent, it’s this leap of faith, right?
Anand Gopalan
It’s this combination of sheer fear of failure, which is like, oh, my God, I think I’m going to fail at this. But then that drives you to completely learn new things and new skills and talk to new people who you’ve never talked to before and reeducate yourself. And I find that journey very satisfying and exciting and thrilling. So you take that leap of faith and you then go through the journey. And once you’re on the journey, I love it. And so I overcome the fear, and then I love it. And it’s usually always, I’ve been lucky. It always works out. But it starts with that leap of faith in sheer fear.
Brett
Well, let’s talk about your latest reinvention. So take us back to it looks like October 2021. The founding of the company. What were those early conversations like?
Anand Gopalan
Yeah, so my co-founders name is Mahesh. Mahesh and I have known each other for many years. He was actually my customer at my previous company. And so we have sort of been in the trenches with robotics and things like that. And so when Mahesh and I started talking first. It was just this bouncing around of ideas of, oh, you know, I wish this was there. This existed in the world and this existed in the world. And I was done with my previous company. Mahesh was still sort of in his job doing things. And at some point all of those ideas just kick around, take some form and shape. And then I think more than the specific idea of what we wanted to work on, it was first the intent of actually, yeah, let’s go actually build a company together.
Anand Gopalan
And that, I think, came first. I think Mahesh called me and said, hey, I’m thinking of, like, finding another thing to do. Should I take up this job offer I have, or should we do a startup? And I said, hey, like, if you can make ends meet, and that’s not a problem, you should definitely try the startup thing with me. And so that was, I think, the pivotal moment, if you will, when we got started.
Brett
And then what does the company do? Just for those listening in, can you give us a quick, high level overview?
Anand Gopalan
Yeah, sure. So the founding idea of bio robotics is that we want to build a nervous system that powers any mobile robot and allows it to see and move through the world safely. Anything that is on wheels, that needs to see and move through the world in any environment. We have built basically a common nervous system, if you will, which involves both hardware and software that allows this robot to see and move through the world.
Brett
And who are the customers? Or maybe just give us an idea of the ICP of this type of product.
Anand Gopalan
Yeah. So when you think about, there’s probably like three types of customers, right? So there’s customers who have robots already, who want their robots to see the world better or move through the world better. So these are customers who are looking for either sensing technology or looking for both sensing and drive technology allows their existing robotic systems to move through the world better. So you can think of factory automation, you can think of warehouse automation, even autonomous vehicles and cars. The other end of the spectrum are customers who have an automation need. For example, we have customers who want to deliver goods, e commerce customers who want to deliver goods efficiently to their end users, and they’re just looking for a full robotic solution that can do that in the best unit economics.
Anand Gopalan
And so these are the sorts of customers we talk to all the time.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And what stage of commercialization are you at? Is this full commercial ready?
Anand Gopalan
Yeah, so I think we are in that stage where we are commercial ready now, and we are actively working with customers. We are essentially in that first push into the market where you’re not trying to basically get every single customer. You’re trying to actually carefully curate your first group of customers who can truly make you successful and also make your product the best product that it can be. There’s a tight feedback loop with these first group of customers who are constantly basically calling you and giving you feedback and saying, this doesn’t work, or this could better, and you’re refining the product as you’re also working with these customers to make their end system successful.
Brett
How do you find early customers like this?
Anand Gopalan
I think it’s a combination. Well, I think I would be lying if I said I had the perfect answer to that question. First of all, I think it’s a combination of a lot of conversations with people who I’ve worked with for many years, and Mahesh has worked with for many years, who we deeply understand the problems that exist in robotics, and we are trying, we have this common desire to solve them, and they often are in many of these companies who are trying to solve these problems. And so it’s these deep conversations sometimes, that lead to really interesting commercial collaborations, and sometimes on the other end of the spectrum, it’s this sort of really random outreach where you almost, like, sit down and say, hey, who are the people in the world who this thing could really help?
Anand Gopalan
And who are the companies who are probably working on these problems and then trying to find the right person? And often it’s really the challenge is not finding the company, but it’s finding the right person within the company to go talk to and digging through your electronic Rolodex and then finding that connection to that person and then having that one conversation, and sometimes that flicks. So it’s very sort of organic and nonlinear, and it’s a combination of those sorts of outreaches that have led to our first group of customers.
Brett
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Brett
What about from a marketing perspective, what’s the general marketing philosophy and strategy right now?
Anand Gopalan
Yeah, I think the philosophy is definitely technology and product led. And maybe this is because my background as an engineer, and so are my co-founders. I think we spent a lot of time talking to who could be our potential end customers. And ultimately, robotics is very much hard tech sell, right? So you’re selling, it’s engineers selling to engineers. And so there’s a lot of time just understanding what is the right set of tools that the world needs, and then developing a technology and product that creates that. And once you do that, then I think the marketing follows where it is really about creating, whether its messaging, whether it is outreach, even the brand of the companies all around what problem in the world we are trying to solve. So at least thats how we have approached it.
Anand Gopalan
We have been light on marketing in the early stages of the company, very focused on defining what we are bringing to the world. And then once we have understood that very clearly through the voice of our customers, then using that define the messaging and the outreach strategy, whats that process.
Brett
Been like for you to learn marketing? It sounds like in a lot of your other roles this year wasnt a territory that you were spending a lot of time on. How have you approached learning marketing?
Anand Gopalan
I think theres two or three aspects to it. The aspect that came very easily to me personally was the quantitative aspect. This is the numbers aspect of it. Understanding market sizing and understanding asps, and understanding pricing strategy and understanding that aspect of product marketing. That was the spark that came easy to me. So when we started the company, I started off, we spent a lot of time thinking, for example, about unit economics of mobile robots. And the first thing I did was built like a spreadsheet, just so that I could understand what makes robots expensive and what are the key things we would need to solve for to make robots cheaper. So that’s the sort of stuff that comes very naturally to me.
Anand Gopalan
The stuff that I had to learn was really the storytelling, because ultimately, engineers love to talk about the how, but ultimately, you have to go from the how, talking about the why, right? And like, why is this important to the world? And that doesn’t come naturally to me. And it’s surrounding myself with people who know how to do that and kind of learning from that and then defining a strategy that kind of leverages that. So I think thats been the approach. And, of course, i’ve been fortunate to work with people who know that storytelling aspect of it really well, and then embracing that when you get good feedback.
Brett
What do you think today has been the most important go to market decision that you’ve made?
Anand Gopalan
I think the most. And I think one of the challenges for us as a company, every company has some of these really pivotal questions. One key pivotal question for us was the technologies that we created could be used to build a very compelling product in one single vertical, or we enable many different products within the robotics space to be successful. And we always had this tension about do we go horizontal, or do we go vertical and deep? And we decided to actually take the platform horizontal approach and approach multiple verticals. That was a pivotal decision. I think it’s held us in good stead, because we’re seeing this moment in the tech world where robotics combined with AI, is having this moment of almost a cambrian explosion of opportunity.
Anand Gopalan
And I think the fact that we stayed horizontal and continued to talk to customers in many different spaces really helped us out. But that was, I think, a very key decision.
Brett
What about growth? Are there any numbers or metrics that you can share that highlight the traction that you’re seeing today?
Anand Gopalan
Yeah, I think, unfortunately, we are early enough that a lot of what we do is still very proprietary and we can’t share customer names and such, but we are basically, we have seen in the past year, effectively a really huge funnel of customers. Effectively, the size of our funnel has practically tripled in the past twelve months. And we have seen a huge influx of interest in our technology, as well as the fact that we are now seeing conversion rates of those early customer funnels into sort of design wins at a pretty nice clip. So I would say that we are still early enough in our journey that we track our success more in terms of entry of customers into the funnel, as well as the conversion of those customers into true design wins. And those metrics are looking pretty good.
Brett
What do you attribute to that success? And to make those metrics look good like that, I’m sure any Founder listening in is thinking, yeah, I want to do that too. What are you doing? Right.
Anand Gopalan
So I think for us, it was really spending a lot of time talking to the customers early on in our journey. I think if I was really point to two things that we did antithetical to her nature as engineering founders. One was, as I said, spending a lot of time before we even started building anything, identifying kind of who was our hero customer or our favorite customer, and then actually trying to find those people in those companies, and then go talk to them, and then really spend a lot of time on often multiple conversations, really refining what the value proposition of what we would build would be. So I think that once we started building it was clear that the market would show up once we built it, rather than building it first and then going and trying to find the market after that.
Anand Gopalan
While its very cliche to say that actually, it’s amazing how often you just rush into building something without having those conversations. Those conversations took us six to eight months, right. So it wasn’t short. And the other thing was, as I said before, also sitting down and understanding the unit economics of what were going to build. Because ultimately we had a robotics business and robotics businesses live or die on, like unit economics of the hardware and software subsystems. The first thing we did was we built a spreadsheet to define what the right unit economics of a solution would look like. And then we live by that spreadsheet. So I think both those things held us in really good stead, because now that we have a product and a solution, it hits the spot. And thats really allowed us to see sort of huge interest.
Anand Gopalan
Once we are ready to actually go out and engage, the interest has been very quick.
Brett
Trey, what about funding? As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 12.7 to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Anand Gopalan
Oh God, I think every Founder has their own story about this, right. And I think the first thing I would say about fundraising is it’s the most nonlinear process that anybody can go through. And this is really hard, especially if you’re an engineer or engineering Founder, because as an engineer, you’re used to sort of linearity, right. What I mean by that is, if you spend 8 hours a day working on something, you will get an output that is commensurate. The amount of effort that you put in fundraising is absolutely not like that, right.
Anand Gopalan
You can have ten conversations with a specific investor trying to convince them, and it will all look great until like, they call you one day and say, oh, I’m sorry, like, you have a great team, but we decided not to invest, and there’ll be another conversation that is literally like 45 minutes and the investor is in, right. And it’s really hard to know which one is which. And so I think when you do this a few times, you develop, theres something to be said for repeat in entrepreneurs, because they have a go to set of investors who they know will at least have a serious conversation with them. But if you’re sort of new in this journey, its challenging because its super non linear. You don’t know which conversations are going to converge.
Anand Gopalan
So the biggest thing I learned is the fact that you have to just get very comfortable with that nonlinearity, right? Like ten meetings with that investor could basically lead to nothing. And that doesn’t mean that the next one is going to be the same, and you just have to get really comfortable with that sort of uncertainty and nonlinearity.
Brett
Trey, what advice would you have for a Founder if they come to you and they say, hey, I want to build a robotics company? What advice would you have based on everything you’ve learned throughout your journey so far?
Anand Gopalan
I think I would say, first, any robotics business, again, like I go back to saying that really understand the unit economics of what you’re building, because I think that’s really important. The other thing I would say is that robotics is a complex, challenging, deep technology venture. So really find an investor who has the appetite. You need at least one investor who’s going to stick with you through the whole journey, and you need to find that one investor who’s got the appetite to take that long, deep tech journey with you. And I think thats really important, because as a Founder, there’ll be enough moments of self doubt, and you’ll feel like you’re sort of on your own at sea in the midst of all of this.
Anand Gopalan
But I think its really important to find that one strong investor and then do your homework to find the right problem with the right unit economics that you’re going after. If you do those two things, then I think you can be very successful. I think the world needs a lot of solutions in this space, but you got to find those couple of right partners to go along in the journey.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like here?
Anand Gopalan
I think for us, the big picture vision is really what we have built. We see as a nervous system that can make all sorts of mobile robots happen for very low cost. So we see ourselves as most simply changing how stuff moves in the world, whether it’s goods that show up at your doorstep or stuff moving around inside a factory or a warehouse. In three to five years, I would hope that we are sort of that nervous system that powers this wave of robots that we see coming clearly. I think ten years from now, I think you will see robots in all parts of our lives. And if we are that nervous system that enables those robots to see and move through the world, I think that would be a pretty cool achievement to look back on.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision, and I look forward to having you back on in three to five years to talk about all the progress that we made to execute on that vision.
Anand Gopalan
Thank you so much. We’d love to do that.
Brett
And we’re going to have to wrap here. But before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired. They want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go?
Anand Gopalan
Oh, they can go to our website, vayurobotics.com, or they can shoot me an email at anand biobotics.com
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Anand Gopalan
Thanks. Thanks, Brett.
Brett
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