Hardware Podcasts

Reimagining and Investing in Legacy Industries with Obvious Ventures’ Nan Li

Manufacturing Happy Hour · 30 Nov 2021 · 43m

What this episode covers

Nan Li, Managing Director at Obvious Ventures, discusses the current inflection point for robotics and automation, driven by improved hardware/software maturity and urgent labor shortages in legacy industries. He highlights portfolio companies like Dexterity and Bright Machines, explaining how they are moving beyond pilot phases to production-grade deployments by focusing on specific problems rather than general technology. Li emphasizes the importance of 'industry empathy,' arguing that successful founders must deeply understand the operational realities of facilities like UPS and Amazon rather than just building technology in a vacuum. He predicts a massive scale-up of robotic deployments in the next five years, with thousands of units being deployed company-wide.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Obvious Ventures, Dexterity, Bright Machines, Kiva Systems, Amazon, UPS, ABB
Also
Toronado, Machine Visions

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