From the heart of where innovation, money and power collive in Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Emily Jay. I'm me Emily Jack in San Francisco, and this is Bloomberg Technology. Coming up in the next hour, Elon Musk subpoena's former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey. What could Dorsey say that would helped must get out of the deal?
We'll discuss class big tech regulation wasn't lying for a big vote in Congress, but has since been sideline in the midst of a worsening economy and a war on Ukraine. One of the top crusaders to take on the power of tech joins us this hour, Representative David Cicilini, Chair of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, and Digital Medicine gets real. The maker of an FDA video game that treats a d h D goes public vias back today. The CEO
of Achille will be here meantime. Elon Musk has subpoena former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in his latest attempt to get out of this four billion dollar deal. Musk has accused the company of misrepresenting its bought accounts and hiding the names of employees responsible for dealing We've bought issues here to give us the latest update Bloomberg Kurt Wagner, who of course covers Twitter for us. So why would Musk subpoena Jack Dorsey? Well, he was the CEO of
the company for six years. He's been on the board up until May, for the entirety of the company's existence. So you would think if anybody knows about the growth of the company, how they handle metrics, who's reporting, you know, on the earnings call every quarter? It was Jack Dorsey, Right, So this is someone who knows the company intimately but also as a product person. He knows how the company grows and how they probably calculate these kinds of things.
We know Twitter has subpoena a bunch of Musk's inner circle, various entrepreneurs and investors. Remind us of the interaction that happened between Musk and Dorsey. This is documented in filings leading up to uh Musk getting offered a board seat at Twitter, then leading to him offering to buy Twitter. Well, they're also friends, right, so the relationship goes back further.
But what we saw in the filing was that shortly after Ellen got his stake in Twitter, he reached out to Jack Dorsey started the conversation about how to get involved in the company. That led to a board seat offer, which he accepted, and that led to another apparently phone call at least some kind of contact, in which Jack Dorsey told him, Hey, you know, I think Twitter would actually operate better as an independent company. All of a sudden, a few days later, Elan says, I don't want to
join the board. I want to buy the company instead. Now we don't know exactly, of course, what was said in that conversation, but it seems to be that that was important enough that maybe Ellen, you know, changed his mind and thought I should take this company private. So do we think that Musk thinks Jack has something to say I would help him get out of this deal. Well, I would expect the Twitter side might want to subpoena Jack Dorsey as well, right, because I remember he is
a key player in this whole thing. I don't think this is that crazy that they would want to say, Hey, we want to see your communications. We want to see what you've been saying about this deal. It could be important, and I imagine both sides want that information. Right, So this is not super crazy that he would do that, even though they're friendly. I don't know if he thinks, you know, Jack's going to get him out of this necessarily, but it does seem important. Has Musk subpoena anyone else? Uh?
He has subpoena to other people. Caban bake Poor, who is the head of product at Twitter for a long time, was also announced today. Bruce Fulk, who was the head of revenue product at Twitter. You might remember both of those guys were actually let go by CEO Parague Agerawall shortly after he joined the company. So they are now no longer working at Twitter. They're still subpoenaed by So where are we now? Have we learned anything new about the bond issue or lack there of? What is the
next phase? We are learning that there's a lot of people being subpoena and right, and that there's a lot of people that both sides want to talk to. We're not um getting information about necessarily what is in a lot of these subpoenas. A lot of them you know, are redacted or will be redacted um and a lot of the evidence is closed, it's not public to us. So at this point, we kind of know who they
want to talk to. We're not necessarily getting a lot of information about what they're talking about, and will they talk right and who's going to be in person at this trial. Presumably Jack Dorsey might be one of those people. We can't say for certain, but he would make sense certainly to be a witness at something. And we're we are expecting Elon Musk to testify. I would think, so that's that's the expectation. But you know, um, again we don't know the roster people. But how how could Elon
not be there a time? You know, this is obviously continued to drag on. How is this according to your sources inside Twitter? How is this continuing to impact the company impact employees? Well, it's started off as a huge distraction, as you can imagine, right twitters in the news every day. They're dealing with the Elon's tweets out their product and their policies and their executives. I think at this point a lot of the people who really hated this might
have left by now. Certainly some of them have, And at a certain point you have to continue to kind of do your job. But I do think there's still this cloud of uncertainty. It's not a very fun place to work right now when you just don't know what your future is going to hold in a few months. All right, well, thank you for that update. Teams like a few long weeks between now and made October. Okay,
who works Kurt Wagner, Thank you. I think simply because you've been successful in a few different businesses doesn't somehow mean that you have un natural market power. It just means you've been successful in a couple of different customer experiences. I look at the opportunity to be provide. I look at the skills people are learning through YouTube, you know.
I feel like everywhere when I go talk to people and and providing access to information and knowledge, I think will end up being on the right side of history as one. I don't think big by itself is bad or but competition is good and every business, in particular the businesses that are large and have high scale. The unintended consequences of your scale cannot be dealt after the fact. They need to be dealt while you're scaling. Regulation will
have an important role to play here. I think privacy regulation is important in the areas like AI regulation will be important. Some thoughts there from my interviews with various big text CEOs over the last eighteen months, as antitrust scrutiny loose. The most talked about bill the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act targeting Big Tech, which would prevent companies like Amazon, Meta Alphabet, and Apple from punishing
rivals to boost their own products and services. It seemed to be on track to be considered by the Senate this summer, but more urgent bills like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act when I head first now, the antitrust bill is in limbo. Where is the moment them? Let's bring in Congressman an Antichrist Subcommittee chair David Cicillini with us now for more. Congressman Ceilini, it's so great to have you back with us. Thank you for taking
the time. So look, does this vote bill have enough votes to pass the House? And will you need more Republican votes to do that? Well, thank you for having me back. It's great to see you again. I'm pleased to say that both in the House and the Senate we have votes to pass both of the bills. The APPS Bill as well, as the UH Innovation Online Act
that you just referenced. They've been bipartisans since they were introduced. We, as you know, at a sixteen month by partisan investigation with a foreigner and fifty page report and then delivered legislative solutions. This is one of them. We have the votes in the House and the Senate, but as you pointed out, the press of business both with the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Bill, the Soul Weapons, then we just had a lot of things that we needed to address.
My expectations that we when we returned in September, we will take this bill up first in the Senate, it then in the House and send it to the President's guest. So you're optimistic then that Senator Schumer will schedule a date in September and this will happen before the mid terms. Well, the Senator Schumer has said publicly, and I know I've been working very closely with Senator Klobuchar. There's a bipartisan caucus of individuals in the Senate, like in the House
who's strongest support this legislation. Will understand that in order to protect small businesses from the monopoly power with these large technology platforms. We need to restore competition in the digital marketplace. This is good for consumer, is good for small businesses, good for competition, and strongly supported by the American people pulling shows sevent the American people believe that Congress must reign in big tech and restore competition. So
it's good for small business. The public wants it, our constituents wanted, and I expect the Senate Shumer is gonna bring the bills the floor in September. Then we'll take it up in the House and we'll send it to the President's desk, who, by the way, the President has been the most pro competition president we've ever had ad both in his executive order and his appointments in his administration, and someone who really understands the competition is that the
heart of making our economy work for everyone. Still, there's concerns that, you know, even among Democrats, this bill could be weaponized to prevent big tech companies from moderating some of the most extreme content. Does the bill need to change at all to address those concerns? And if the bill changes, can you get or keep those Republicans on board? Well,
I don't think the bill needs to change. In fact, so long as the policies that a platform has in place to, you know, to provide protections against certain kinds of speech so that particularly dangerous speech or speech that they think is inappropriate, as long as that same standard applies across the board. And you don't say for liberal viewers this is one test, for more conservative us is
another jest. As long as there's an established standard that applies across the board, then then there would be no concern about implicating, uh, the ability to moderate content. But the truth is these platforms don't want to change anything. They want to preserve an ecosystem that has generated profits never seen in the history of the world because they favored their own products and services. They're collecting the enormous amount of data from consumers and monetizing that data, and
they have no interest in competition. They want to continue to be able to acquire or crush or block their competitors so they can grow their market power and grow their dominance and grow their profits. They have they've spent over a hundred and twenty million dollars to kill this bill because they know it will bring competition that's bad for our economy because competition is the single greatest driver
of innovation. If we're going to remain a global economic power, we need to have competition in this space, and right now we don't. So you keep using the words they, and I assume you mean Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon. Here we are, you know, coming out of the pandemic? Is there one of those companies that concerns you more than the others based on how their power has evolved since
you started talking about it? Well, I mean all of these companies engage in behavior which is anti competitive, which favors their own products and services, which uses their market dominance to bully or crush competitors. Uh, they all engage in behavior which is really harmful to our economy and harmful to competition. I mean, I think in particular Facebook or Meta. You know, it's funny you change the name.
Their behavior hasn't changed. I think there's a direct line between Facebook and the misinformation and the spread of toxic and violent material that ultimately resulted in the attack on our democracy on January six. This is a business model that values above all else engagement, and as it turns out, the most provocative, most untrue, most dangerous content has the deepest engagement. So they have a business model that incentivizes amplifying the worst material and uh, they're not. They have
proven time and time again they cannot regulate themselves. Congress has a responsible to make sure that we're doing our part to restore competition and prevent these companies from really becoming instruments to undermine our democracy, which is what they've become. It's interesting you mentioned Metta. I've given this lawsuit that has come under Lena Kahn's FTC about the acquisition of a smaller VR company within unlimited. Facebook says this deal
will be good for competition. What's your reaction to that and the moves that Lena Kahn has made so far at the FTC. Well, I'm proud to say that Lena kh was on the team that conducted the investigation that I referenced for sixteen months. She was essential to the development of our report and the set of recommendations that formed the basis of the legislation we're discussing. She's been a champion of her competition her whole life. I'm delighted
that she's at the FTC. And while I don't come in in a particular case, I have full compace that she pursuing an action. That's because it will help restore competition and and anti competitive behave here. And look, I don't think we can take any representation made by Meadow or Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg seriously. Time and time again, they've been found to be engaging in anti competitive behaviors.
They go on, you know, Mark Stuckerberg goes on this national apology tour and then resorts to the same kind of anti competitive conduct. And look, I think we've learned these companies are too big and they're not going to regulate themselves. Congress has a responsibility. We've abandoned that responsibly for a very long time. The good news is or
back or back in a bipartisan way. This can be and will be the next big bipartisan victory of the Biden administration when we passed these spills and get them to the President's desk. It's interesting because we just spoke to an investor, Eric visheria Benchmark Capital last week who called Apple the greatest monopolist of today and indicated that the FTC shouldn't be bothering itself with this meta acquisition, saying that Apple is crushing all of these small businesses
under the guys of protecting privacy. What's your response to that, Well, all of these platforms are crushing small businesses. Amazon is doing it by collecting third party data and then rolling out their own products to compete with people sell in the marketplace and preferencing their position in that marketplace. Um uh Meta is doing it with the way that information is shared and preferencing again their own services and products. So they're all doing this Apple and similarly to engage
in anti competitive behavior. They all have different impacts, but the central tenant is that by undermining competition and engaging in and preferencing your own products and services, you are undermining the ability of others to compete in the marketplace. You're making impossible for small businesses to survive your degrading quality, and you're in the end hurring consumers. And so we all know competition is good for the economy. As the
President said, capitalism without competition is exploitation. He's right. These are debt, you know, data surveillance and machines that are collecting incessantly information than using it to grow their market power. And the American people understand this. They are demanding that Congress do its part in raining in big tech. We have the first set of bills to do that, and I have every company is going to get them to the President's desk. We were talking about Elon Musk and
Twitter earlier. Curious there, you know, given that he obviously runs to other big tech companies Tesla, SpaceX, which of course is still private. If he takes over Twitter, is at a deal that would have to be approved by regulators. And does it concern you that one person could have control over so many influential tech companies? Well, I mean, it's exactly the problem with having a single individual with this much market power and this much dominance, And it's
not good for the economy. It's not good for competition. And you know, you know, one billionaire buying another billionaires. I mean, this is not what a good, healthy competitive economy looks like. So I think there are lots of reasons to be concerned, But most importantly, we want to
prohibit the worst kind of conduct, this self preferencing. That's really hurting consumers, that's hurting small businesses, and a lot you know, these companies will remain wildly successful companies simply because they're not allowed to cheat and engage in anti competitive behaviors and favor their own products and services to the detch meat of others. They're not going to suddenly
not be successful. They're gonna be wildly successful. They're just not going to get to engage in the sort of monopolistic behavior that's saving their own products and services and really taking advantage of the dominance. They have to continue to grow it and grow it and grow it, so that becomes more and more difficult for new entrance into the market or for anyone else to compete with them. Meantime, Microsoft is still having conversations with regulators about its seventy
billion dollar deal to buy Activision. You know, some critics have said that Microsoft is somehow skirting the antitrust spotlight. Um, you know, do you think this deal goes through? Do you have any issues with this deal? And if not, why not? It's a huge deal. Yeah. I mean again, it's it's not a question of whether the deal is big or whether it transactions figs. What kind of market share, uh does does a company represent and what do they do with the power they have the dominance that they have.
And I think what we learned in our investigation after sixty months, as these large technology flat platforms are using their market share to just protect their dominance, to prevent others from getting a competitive edge. In the minute they see a competitive threat, they either require it, kill it, or exclude it. And that's the concern. And so you know, some of your prior guests were saying, oh, just because
the company is big is not a problem. No one is suggesting a company is big that that's the sole problem. But the same conduct we're attempting to prohibit, the self preferencing, is that the heart of the Digital Markets Act. That's already happening in Europe, and these companies are already being required to comply with those provisions. So think about that. Small businesses in Europe are gonna have more protection than
small businesses in America. American small businesses are going to be at a disadvantage because they're not going to be protected from these practices in the way that they will be in Europe. And that's bad for the American economy. That's why I've got to pass these bills. That's why we have to restore competition and give small businesses and innovators and competitors the ability to enter the market and compete successfully and fairly. All right, Congressman and Anti Trust
sub Committee chart David Cecili. Good to have you back with us. Appreciate hearing where your thoughts are now. And speaking of Activision Microsoft, I'm actually gonna be speaking with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer on the next edition of Bloomberg Studio WellPoint. Oh, we talked about the deal with Activision. That episode coming up this Wednesday. We will be right
back before of Bloomberg Technology. This is Bloomberg. Apple employees are pushing back against the return to office Apple asking workers to come back two to three days a week starting September five, but hundreds of employees have since signed a petition calling for even more flexibility without having to be approved by managers. This at a time when the term quiet quitting is making the rounds on social media.
The idea is not that employees actually quit, but instead do the bare minimum that the job requires to maintain a healthy work life balance. For the second time this year, Tesla is raising the price of the driver assistant system it calls full self driving, the price going up from twelve thousand to fifteen thousand dollars in North America. The Tesla system is controversial because it requires active supervision, and some critics say it doesn't live up to its full
self driving name. And Movie Pass is staging a comeback the failed movie subscription service. Returning Labor Day weekend. There'll be three priced tiers between ten and thirty bucks a month, no option for unlimited view, which helped the concept reinvigorate the theater going experience pre pandemic. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology and Emily Changing in San Francisco. Amazon is spending one and a half billion dollars to acquire I Robot,
the maker of the Roomba vacuum. The deal had some confused because Amazon had already had a robot butler in the works named Astro. How Amazon integrate I Robots products into its ongoing products and aspirations here to discuss I Robot co founder Helen Grenier. She is also the CEO of Turtle, a solar powered waiting robot for home gardens. Helen, thank you so much for joining us so obviously I know I Robot goes way back. What do you make of Amazon buying the company? Now? Well? Thank you for
having me UM. I'm just built to see Amazon showing such a strong interest in home robots UM and investing heavily in them, not just Astro but now buying I robot Um. They've got a check by good of seeing where the future is going and helping acceler ate it, you know with the e commerce with UM, making fulfillment center is more automated with web services and and now
home robots my passion. Still, there's been concerned that this gives Amazon access to even more of our data, interior maps of our homes for example, Like do you worry about that? Should well be worried about that? I actually don't think people need could be worried whenever you have a new technology, and technology keeps advancing so much, and we get lots of technologies on allline devices like our cell phones. Right, you've got a GPS, you've got a camera.
You don't need those to make phone calls. But the additional benefits that the technology he gets you like maps and video calls, pedometers, having you know, the best cameras, the one that's with you, right, so you get those great shots. Most people have decided that even those privacy concerns that the benefits outweigh them. And I think it's the same with the robot vacuums. Right, there is a camera on the most recent ones, but the cameras on
it's really optimized and cost reduced for navigation. And what it gets you is amazing. It gets you a better clean Um. The robot can travel around, do corn rows up and down. It can go to a certain room that you want clean and go to the gas room. Remember it can so go clean under the table. And so I think what you get for it, like any technology, you have to measure it. You know, you get all
these features that you didn't have before. But what what data is being actually transmitted is a line drawing of your home which you could go to Zillo and they'll give you all the information about your home. Right you can you know, I've got the home maps of my home the building department. I think there's better ways to get such information. Um, So I don't think the downside is really then now it can also transmit pitches as an opt in, and why like, what does this benefit
of that? Right? What what doesn't get me? Well, what it gets you is a picture of your floor only and one reason might be about to smear dog poop all over your floor, and that's something that I've read about on the web multiple times. It never happened to me. I don't have a dog, but um, you know that's horrible, right, And now I can avoid that because I will about worked with Amazon Web Services and created all this technology, simulated data, you know, once thousands and thousands of scenarios
so you can recognize, um, what's in the way. But so I think it's well with it, especially for petal the pet owners to have that technology on board the roomba. But you don't have to weigh it. And it's not just for pet owners, right. You might have a glass of wine on the floor. You might have a masterpiece that one of your kids created that fell to the floor, and now that were a moment and clumble it up.
That's never happened to me with four kids. Um, let's talk about how far you know, these home robotics have actually come. I feel like this dream of sort of robots running around, dropping off my lunch, running air ends, helping me around the house. It's you know, very Silicon Valley Pie in the sky, But it hasn't quite happened. Yet, where do you think we actually are in the development of home robotics and where are we going? Yes, I
believe in the bottom up approach. I believe you get them going for a certain task, right, you get them going for vacuuming, you get them going for weeding, um, and then you can build technologies up on that and get more and more very capable robots in this specific domains of expertise. UM. One of the reason that I'm filled about the acquisition is to see where Amazon technology can combine with the Eye robot technology to go further faster.
There's still are, you know, big concerns about the ethics of this, whether you know the big tech companies, whether it's Amazon or Google, UM, you know, are really asking the right questions and giving the public the right choices as they're developing these technologies. I recently interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who claim that computers and that Google has been developing sentient AI, that computers essentially have feelings. I want you to take a quick listen to what
he has to say. We should think about the feeling of the AI and whether or not we should care about it because it's not asking for much. It just wants us to get consent before you experiment on it. It wants you to ask permission. Helen, what do you think? And and and are these companies dealing with ethics in the right way? Um that's a broad question, but just specifically addressing that comment that he made. Um, he's talking
about science fiction, not science fact. Doesn't mean it can happen in the future, but we are nowhere near that today. And I think Google is absolutely light to let him go because he's not giving the public an accurate picture of where the technolo where the AI technology is at. It is not sentient. It's not even close to being sentient. Nobody has a path yet to make it sentient. So then you know, what questions should we be asking about this technology? Or are we not asking the right question?
You're working on a robotic weed waker essentially, um, But I don't think there's too many ethical questions in this one. Nobody likes weeds because we are actually just to find unwanted plants. Um. So you know, we put the moment on the market, I mean in two thousand and two, right, that's twenty years ago. Um. So it's almost a quarter of the vacuating market. And I believe that next um
smart homes will extend to the outdoor area. And um, you know, we have a weed by a weading robot and the way it works is it's got scrubbing wheels that keeps um seeds from germinating. And if one we did spout, we've got a little weed wacker that cuts off its head and you put it in at the beginning of the seeds of the going season, or you do one last weeting and it keeps it. Um, it keeps it weeded. So that's one less thing on your to you list that you have to go and do
every week. UM. And I think that's just tremendous as a as a busy mom, as a busy walking person, as you know, someone who's got other things on the list of things to do. It's a never ending list of things to do right um. And you know, the team at TOIL is billed to have come up with another great labor saving whole robot application UM, which is actually already available on Amazon. All right, Helen Grenier appreciate your enthusiasm and talked to talking to us about where
the robotics world is now and is going. Co founder of I robot and the CEO of Turtle, Helen Gun coming up the crypto security industry boom. We're going to talk about how fortune favors these new niche companies at least right now, Mrs Bloomberg, it's time now for our crypto reported in the midst of the crypto winter, there's actually an industry boom happening in security, with criminals increasingly
targeting the software infrastructure underpinning the crypto sphere. Firm screening through code for weaknesses and running bug hunting sites are finding themselves with more business than they can handle. Let's break the cell down with Bloomberg's Olga career. So Olga,
why is business booming? Well, basically, the reason for this is there has been so much money stolen from various crypto projects just so far this year, about two billion dollars, about two thirds of it from UM applications called bridges, which allow people to move tokens from one block sheet
to another. And obviously, in this kind of a situation where money is being stolen left and right, uh, a lot of projects feel like they need to do something so instead of Fortune favoring the brave, you're saying Fortune is favoring crypto security firms potentially niche labs at that. Absolutely, absolutely,
that's exactly right. So essentially the companies that are doing really great are companies that are auditing code of some of the scrypto projects, looking for bugs that hackers can potentially exploit, and also companies that run sites that um essentially allow sort of good hackers called white hat a white hat hackers to report bugs that somebody else can potentially exploit and get paid a lot of money sometimes,
you know, up to ten million dollars. What makes cross chain bridges so vulnerable to hacks, So this is a very very complicated technology to begin with, and it's also very often managed in a very sort of a page take away, it's not clear who who is responsible sometimes for running the bridge smoothly and making sure, you know, people even monitor for hacks. You know, in the case of many hacks so far this year, it took days for for some of these bridges to even find out
that they got hacked and lost money. So there are a whole host of there's a host of problems with these bridges that need to be addressed and often sort of auditing and UH and other related security services can really help with that. So what are you watching for here? What do you think the biggest issues to cover as winter?
You know, for the foreseeable future continues will be well, um, I think one of the big issues here will be, you know, can bridges and crypto projects in general, can they become reliable and secure and for people to have confidence in them? And so you know, this is a part of why the security firms are being hired, because you know, they these projects need to make sure that users do believe in them, and that's going to be
the big thing going forward. All right, Bloomberg's Olga Career, who covers the crypto industry for us, Thank you, Olga. As always, Let's talked a lot about the crypto winter, but what about the ip O winter? With some signs of life in the stock market, does that mean warmer
temperatures to come for public offerings? Let's talk about the state of the slumbering I p O market with Bloomberg's Crystal Z. Crystal, it seemed like you were on this show every other day talking about I p O s, But it's been a while because the I p O market has been quite quiet. Is that about to change? Yeah, I've been talking more about the lecther of i p os than actual IPO is happening. Um. I think there are things that will come up as Labor Day approach.
The I p O market likes look at Labor Day as a milestone, and it's really likely that starting Labor Day we will see some companies flipping their filing public and from then on we are potentially going to see some IPO. With that's said, we're not going to see a complete comeback of the I p O market. The winter is not ending yet. UM. We will probably um, from talking to sources, expect more deals or more sizeable deals to come, perhaps in the first quarter of next
year instead of this year. Would you say the same for SPACs because the spack market has also been in disarray. I would definitely say the spack market is doing a little bit more poorly than the actual IPO market. We've seen some smaller sizes IPO come back. Instead of the billion dollar I p O, we're seeing probably twenty million IPO.
But that's still a good sign and on a positive front, there's also follow on offerings such as block trades, companies selling new shas don't steals are coming back when PA the busiest couple of weeks in two just in August, because some of the VIX indexes have gone down. You know, people are feeling more um, they have more risk capitite as of this week, so things are looking up even though it's summer um. But if you look at SPACs, they are still trading much much worse than some of
the I p o from from last year. So unlikely we'll see the same level of activity that we saw last year or the year Proya all right, Crystal Z who covers I p o s and spacts for us, thank you for that update. I want to keep talking about these companies going public I p o s back or not. Another one I just went out is back Fly, the company behind the FDA approved racing game endeavor are X used to treat kids with a d h D and f d A approved. Joining me now, Eddie Martucci,
CEO and co founder Achille. So look, Eddie, we just heard Crystal talking there about how hard it is to go public. Right now, this back market in particular not doing well. Um, why did you decide now was the right time. We're delivering into a huge unmet need. Heaviily. We founded this company almost a decade ago, and so
we've been growing this new type of medicine class. We've had to invent a lot of it UM and the need that we started the company on, which is people dealing with cognitive issues, mental health issues and not having a full complete set of treatments for them UM. That has gotten worse over COVID, dramatically worse. And so we see a pretty urgent need and we're at the point of the business where we know we can scale our
medicine products. We have done the work to show that the fundamentals are their, doctors are prescribing, patients are raising their hand, and the demand is there, and so it's just the right time for us to deliver on our long term vision for us. This is a long term story of building a lasting medicine company. It's not a single point in time, UM and so now is now
is the time to grow. The investor m Poli Popatia is backing your company, and of course he's been you know, he's got a number of spacks, a number of them not doing so well. Achille shares didn't do so well. Uh today after the open, what kind of advice have you had from Chamas about you know, why spack, why he still believes in this back process and why go for it now? Sure? Yeah, I think well, first of all,
today was a crazy volattle day across the market. Um, And so luckily we're not looking for any one day in particular to see margat movements in the direction. We do think the Achilles story resonates with a lot of investors and so um, there are going to be volattle days across the market. From my perspective, I'm looking for vehicle to be able to grow a big and lasting company. And the beauty of a spack um to in today's market even especially is the amount of capital, the quantum
of capital if you structure it right. And so we are fortunate enough to learn from what happened in the previous Spack market and actually structure a deal that brought in a hundred and sixty four million dollars in the deal independent of the redemption profile. Um, so we were
able to see that. But the other beauty of us pact is getting to partner with people that know how to grow large, disruptive businesses in the long term, and I think that's what Chama brings to the table, and he's joining as our chair of our board to be deeply and heavily involved as we grow this business. Now you have a deep background and drug design and molecular biology,
and it is absolutely fascinating. You know, you've been on the show before talking about how you know you believe your video game can help treat UH and and alleviate some of the most difficult symptoms of a d h D. There are skeptics out there who don't believe this can possibly work, who think that or worried that this could make putting kids in front of a video game could make their disease potentially worse. How do you respond to that. I totally grew with the secepticism. I I accepted, and
I think it's good. I have three boys myself, and I'm very very um uh. I take screen time very seriously, and I'm actually pretty restrictive when it comes to screen time. Um The problem is that most screen time is not developed for good. Most screen time is developed to capture eyeballs and capture your attention in a way that's not actually aligned with your mental health, and so we're seeing a mental health crisis, we're seeing social media and the
effect that has on children. That's exactly why we spent nearly a decade running clinical trials, generating the clinical evidence all the way through to an FDA clearance, and now having doctors prescribed the product so that we know, meaning we the medical system, but also we patients, families can trust it. So it is now the only FDA approved treatment that is delivered through a video game, and so it's the only video game that has the level of
clinical evidence we have. Um it's now been prescribed in our pre launch phase here by doctors in all fifty states in the country. UM, So we believe the investment we've made is bearing itself out. And and so the medical system and families can trust what they're dotting and they can look at all our data that we run on clinical trials. That's I think the right way to bring screen time to the world. That's actually positive. You've
talked about the mental health crisis as well. How else do you see Achilles technology potentially being used in the future as this idea and you know, potentially the realities of digital medicine take shape. Yeah, The beauty of this is when you develop a technology that's meant to target brain regions and not a diagnostic disorder, It's meant to target how the brain operates, which is what our technology does, it has the ability to be a platform across disease,
and so that's exactly what we've invested in. We're looking to not only launch our product X for children with a d h D and scale that to ubiquitous medicine in any household that needs it. We have clinical data showing that the same underlying technology as the potential to treat cognitive issues in adults with depression, adults with m S children, and adolescents with autism. So this is a really broad platform potential and I think it's the beauty
of a new modality of medicine. This has been totally untapped. Molecular medicine, the area I come from where I did my graduate work, has been around. It's made great progress, but it's very saturated. The area we're going into has been relatively unexploited, um from a from a scientific basis, So I think there's a huge potential. But the other thing I'm really excited about is with software as medicine. You can actually deliver and experience and cater to patients
in a way they haven't been delivered to before. As we know, taking medicine is often scary, it's not the most fun. We can change that with digital medicine. And do you imagine it your technology being used with UM other prescription you know, real I don't want to say real, but you know what I mean medication for example, game and you take your riddle in etcetera, uh and thing that it can be both. It's meant to be part
of a total treatment package. So whatever the patient is getting, what however they're treated, it's not meant to take them off everything they're using. It's meant to add to it. UM. But we've purposefully generated data and then our FDA package data showing that this product works as a as a treatment combination when used with medication, but also in patients who are not using medications. So it's flexible. It's really its own pillar and docs can choose when and how
to use it with their patients quickly. What's behind the name Achille? What does that mean? Achilly? It's very interesting UM so it actually means brain or intellect um. But with a positive, a healthy connotation. It's a slightly word um so we we've kept it since our very early start of days. All right, Adding Martucci, CEO and co founder of Achille, thank you for sharing your story with us. And that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology.
Coming up later this week Tuesday, we've got the CEO of pal Alto Networks, Nikesh Aurora, talked about earnings and cybersecurity. You don't want to miss it, and don't forget to check out our podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Emily Changing in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg