You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Befot Robotics closing another round of funding today million a series be funding led by Tiger Global, bringing the company's total funding raise two over forty one million. So with how they're going to use the money, look at the business. We have so many questions for the next guest. Very pleased to have in the studio with us. Samuel Reeves, the
founder and the CEO of fort Robotics. He's with us in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio right now. Samuel, good to have you with us. Congratulations on the round. I want to talk about the company in just a second, but first, what's it like raising money in an environment like this. It's certainly a challenge, but we're attached to
a big macro trend. We're we're a part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and regardless of what happens in in any momentary downturn um, this is a generational shift in
the way the world works. So there's still a lot of money out there, and if you look at one there's there's still a lot of dry powder, So there is But was it was it noticeably different raising this round in terms of how long it took, the conversations you had to have, the time it took from you know, talking to these LPs to actually get him to sign on the dotted line. Give us some color there. I mean,
I think automation is unique. So what what what was noticeably different for us is that the world is now bought into the idea that everything is going autonomous, So we're we're kind of special in in that way. Robotics funding is still going strong, so I think a lot of folks are seeing a turn down. But but we actually had had a lot of interest in the round and ultimately came on a set of partners we're really happy about. We'll tell us a little bit more about
your business. You guys have been around, correct, um, so tell us because it's not like you're creating the cool elon mosk cumanoid robot. You're stuff, but you're controlling the devices and you're also playing into the security side of this. I explain a little bit about what you guys do. Who are some of your big customers? Sure? Sure We're
a fork is a communications platform for smart machines. So we have this union fusion between safety and security that enables us to deliver information to these machines that they can trust, and so that lets them address what what globally we term as the huge risk of the next generation of automation. So just come out and say it. They're they're going to kill us. They're not gonna kill us if they have their fourth platform. But this is
the this is the you know. So it's not that you're making the robots, right, No, no no, no, we were to help other people make them. Yeah, you have the platform that helps people program them, communicate, communicate with them. Right. And and the fact is autonomous robotics are still is still a developing field. I mean ai IS has has reached a great point of development, but it's still in development.
These machines are still perceiving the world and and acting in the world in a way that UM is in progress. And so if they're going to be moving around in unstructured environments around people, that poses a huge amount of safety risk. Conversely, if they're connecting to the internet, they're all connected to the internet, and so they're all exposed to huge security risks. So whether it's safety risk or security risk. There's a lot of risk on this this
mega trend. So that's that's what we're out here to help people address. Well, tell us a little bit about some of your major customers, right, you play in the O E M market. I mean I'm thinking we're housing, agriculture, construction, manufacturing, mining, transportation, delivery. I mean you play into so many aspects of our world. Tell us about some of the customers, what kind of demand you're seeing, and what it tells you maybe about
our you know, our macroeconomic environment. Sure, so, so we have about three customers about those are really big, big companies. So fortunate with thousand sized customers. Um they Oh so so you'll in your public I'll be able to actually put up on a boombag function right. So so, so it's interesting we're integrated into everybody's technology roadmap, so so we hold a lot of proprietary information about what all these companies are doing. So they get really touchy about
us talking about them. But a few that have that have been public about about using forder. Toyota Material Handling, they're the biggest forklif manufacturer in the world. Boston Dynamics you've probably see very YouTube friendly, right, So they did the sixty minutes where one of our products had a little cameo UM appearance. Hexagon, big Swedish conglomerate. They make control systems for pretty much every production environment like that.
So tell me about the demand you know that you're seeing from such a cross section of so many different industries that play into our global economy. What's the demand that you're seeing and what does it tell you about We're all at this juncture right of trying to figure out, okay, recession, what's next. Europe's dealing with problems, Asias dealing with problems. We are dealing with problems. What does the outlook and the demand based on what you're seeing, what does it
tell you about the economic outlook? Well, I mean I think everybody, um, everybody that makes a machine and everybody that uses a machine is thinking about automating it um And this this came from the labor shortages that were that were pre COVID. I mean, there are a lot of discussions the labor shortages now in the post COVID world where you know, you like Heathrow Airport today saying their curtailing flights because they can't have enough workers to
move the luggage around. Right. But this was a fact of life for people in farms and warehouses and factories, welders, you know, pre COVID. So the automation journey has been something that has been happening for decades, and so I think macroeconomically, people are still investing in this. They see it as a way to smooth production. They see it as a way to bring back production into their their
home area. You know, we got a minute left and then we're gonna come back with you and do a lot more, Samuel, But before we go, talk to us about when you you know, make your trip here today on the train from Philadelphia and you look around and you see where are the areas that stick out for you that are just right for automation. So when you when you when you drive to the train station, you could be in an autonomous car. When you get on
the train, you could be in an autonomous train. When you pass the warehouses on the way to New York, you your seeing autonomous warehouses. You're passing autonomous factors, You're passing autonomous farms. When you pass a golf course, turf care is going autonomous. When you're in an office, I bet your cleaning machines here are are either autonomous or
thinking about becoming autonomous. Retail stores are becoming autonomous, and that's what that's, you know, before we get to the really visible things like like the cars that have gotten a lot of attention lately. I do think about it. When we were flying a bunch to like how much more we were doing and we'll talk about this. The experience wasn't great. I remember, Carroll, were filled together and You're like, Okay, who do I give this to? And
I'm like, there's sorry, Carrol. There's nobody here, nobody around, and we were taking care of everything. And I do think about it retail increasingly, I do self check out like they you know, all right, we're gonna talk about that because that has implications for the labor market. Although there's the flip side of this and meeting people who knew how to make all the stuff that you're doing. We're gonna come back to Samuel Reeves, founder and CEO
at fort Robotics. This is Bloomberg. I want to get right back to our guests. We are talking with Samuel Reeves, founder and CEO at fort Robotics. It's a safety and security platform autonomous machines. He, by the way, is also previously a co founder and president at Humanistic Robotics, and
he's here in our interactive broker studio. UM I want to get to something that we were talking in the break because I think it'll be interesting to our audience because I do wonder we hear we hear robotics or we hear autonomous and we're like, Okay, what does that mean for global workforces? How do you see it in terms of what you're doing and how this might play out well. As we talked before the break, labor shortages.
Labor shortages are nothing new to the economy. UM Covid accentuated it and made it, made labor shortages really on the front of a lot of people's minds. But farming and manufacturing and warehousing and retail have all been dealing with labor shortages for a really long time. So when we talk about this new generation of automation where machines are really thinking and acting on their own, what the promises is that you can create a human machine team.
We're together. The production is a lot more safe, and the corporation that uses this, this human machine team is a lot more productive. So we're not talking about replacing tons of workers. We're talking about taking an existing bunch of workers in any given scenaria and making them a lot more productive with the human machine team, which allows them to basically segregate what each party is good is
good at. I mean, the humans are good at interacting with each other and interacting with other people and making critical thinking decisions and things like that, and so we should enable them to do the things that make them human. And then machines are very precise and predictable, and they should do things like that. But it's not only about
productive right or the right mix. But you also, you know, it is interesting what you said to Tim and I in our break is that you know this is a way of kind of leveling out labor costs globally, right, right, Absolutely, So, so as as the cost of production rises in some of the global places where production goes now and automation over here automation capability increases, I think we'll be able to increasingly move production back to localized areas in the
United States where consumption can be right down the road from the factory and the warehouse that distributes the good. And what that could do is make companies more responsive to local populations. UH, could create jobs, UH in places where there there weren't jobs, could make our manufacturing and warehousing work um workforce a lot more competitive globally. And so I think we've just discovered how brittle supply chains are when they're spread stretched out globally, and we've just
discovered that that their massive labor shortages. And I think automation really addresses both of those, Samuel, I want to get more into the technology here, and specifically, if you allow companies to operate robots in a safe and efficient way, how do you do that better than other companies? Like how do you create a system and I want to use the term unhackable because never want to say that, but but how do you create a system that keeps out bad actors and that also allows these things to
operate in a way that's safe to the people around them. Sure, so we've really focused on communications. So we've we've invented a way to fuse what's called functional safety and cybersecurity to create a way that these machines can communicate in a way that they can trust the information that they're getting. So what they get on the safety side is super highly reliable information like ten knines of reliability, so that they can use that information to make decisions about how
they move. And on the security side, you know, we start with identity. We start we we use the identity to create authentication and then make sure that they're authorized to talk with only certain parties. We borrow a lot of the techniques that have already been created in the human world. I mean a lot. A lot of these techniques have already been established to make humans secure in their activities on the internet, but they haven't really been
applied to machines yet. So we took we took that paradigm, we applied it to machines, We fused it with safety, and we created this unique fusion of safety and security so that all information that machines process can be trusted. Does it ultimately have to have a human? Though? Is the final kind of safety check? Like you can have multiple layers, right, But I do wonder ultimately doesn't have to be a human putting in some code or like, I don't know, Like I think about what we do,
they still needs I don't know. I think it's an interesting theoretical question. Do we want machines to get so smart that they are not out of out of the realm of out of the control of humans, And I would say no. I think the promise of this kind of automation is like one human to very many machines, and that's highly productive. But you always want a human in the loop. That's what our platform allows you to do. Well, continue to stay in touch and let us know how
things are evolving. Thank you for any incoming attacks and robots. Yeah, well we need a red phone. Yeah exactly, let's know when the anchor robots are coming the control. No, No, let humans do what humans are great at. That's the whole thing. I agree. I agree. Um, really nice. Thanks for making the trip up to see us. Our trip down, trip up, trip down. Thanks Samuel Reeves. He's founder and CEO of Fort Robotics. I need a robot to help
me geographically. I'm terrible. I'll show you Google Maps during the break here, all right, then, well then we'll figure it out.