theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Physical AI & Robotics Leaders | Shahan Ohanessian, VenHub

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More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Physical AI & Robotics Leaders

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Shahan Ohanessian

CEO

VenHub

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Retail: VenHub's Unattended System Integrating Robotics and AI

play_circle_outline Cultural impact of VenHub's convenience and interaction with robots

play_circle_outline Growth strategy for VenHub and focus on smart, attractive, and consistent stores

play_circle_outline Expansion into smart pharmacies, lockers, auto parts, and beauty supplies.

play_circle_outline Quick deployment process in seven days for unattended retail stores.

play_circle_outline Allow rebranding and co-branding of stores for customers.

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Shahan Ohanessian, VenHub

Shahan Ohanessian

CEO VenHub

Join Shahan Ohanessian of VenHub as they explore the transformative world of unattended retail within the dynamic setting of the New York Stock Exchange. Hosted by theCube, this session is part of the NYSE Wired Robotics and AI Media Week, focusing on the integration of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence in modern commerce.

In this episode, Ohanessian discusses the revolutionary concept of VenHub, a fully autonomous retail system that combines the efficiency of robotics with the accessibility of traditional retail solutions. With a backdro... Read more

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What was demonstrated and discussed related to a map of the United States with green dots representing over $400 million worth of orders, showcasing a breakthrough in the creation of a fully autonomous retail system for unattended retail? add

What is an example of a loving experience involving a convenience store and how it can be expanded to include various other products and services in the future? add

What are some of the economic factors and costs involved in setting up a store with AI technology? add

What types of products and services are being offered at the convenience store and through the mobile skew? add

What is the timeline for setting up a store with the mentioned process? add

What are the steps involved in customizing and setting up a store through VenHub or theCUBEHub? add

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Shahan Ohanessian, VenHub

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>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're live all week here in the New York Stock Exchange, our CUBE set on the East Coast with the NYSE Wired community and open community that's been formed by theCUBE and the NYSE coming together, bringing the experts on discussing all the top breakthroughs. Of course, we've got our Palo Alto studio linking tech and Wall Street together. This week we're focused on robotics and AI leaders and we've got a great discussion here around how unattended retail with robotics is changing the game. It will be the future. Shahan Ohanessian with VenHub. Exciting, can't wait to talk about this. Welcome to theCUBE.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Thank you. Thank you very much.

>> So you gave us a quick demo. I just want to go to, a quick shot to the iPad here. This is a map of the United States and it's got green dots. These are all the orders you have right now, over $400 million worth of orders. You have created a breakthrough where you've created a self-contained, fully autonomous retail system and packaged goods today that has no attendance. That's unattended retail. Congratulations.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Thank you. Thank you very much.

>> So you got a lot of backlog.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> That is true.

>> So take us through what's going on? Tell us what you guys have and why is it so successful?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> So I reached out to our team initially a few years ago and I said, "Look, we have smart cars, we have smart homes, we have smartphones, but we don't have smart retail and retail is suffering." And they said, "What do you have in mind?" And I said, "I need a store that is extremely smart, very attractive," as VenHub is, "Incredibly intelligent and super customer friendly and it's available 24/7 and has all the security systems in place." And I went through a list of 10 items that I wanted in every vertical. And my team said, "This doesn't exist. We're not doing this." So I said, "Great, this is day one, let's start." And that was our day one and we started and we started the journey. And today when we put the button in for this pre-order, we were shocked. The reception the public gave us the amount of the pre-orders that we received is validating what the world is requesting and is needing and is definitely what the world of the economy is going through. This minimizes crime, recovers from all the labor costs challenges and being open 24/7 and being able to provide constant, continuous, perfect service to the customer.

>> And you sell these to entrepreneurs or small, medium-sized enterprising business owners, they buy it, they own. It's not like a franchise. You get a SaaS fee. So you get a little cloud, we'll come back to the Amazon experience in a second, and they just put it in place and they're responsible for the goods or they can go through replenish service. So a turnkey convenience store. You had a phrase for it before we came on camera, you said it's like the marriage between... Explain what was the description, how you gave it?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Imagine having a vending machine getting married to a retail store and having a genius baby, and this is our genius baby. And that's what we call VenHub, the smart genius baby.

>> So a robotic arm, basically treats it like a vending machine, all the goods are there, the people can see everything, but this intelligence built into the robotics with vision.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> That's correct.

>> It knows what to get when and puts it on the counter, drops down, all mechanical, autonomous, they pay, they get their goods. The robots are smart. They also keep track of the inventory. You get analytics, it sounds like a cloud play. You must know a little bit about-

Shahan Ohanessian

>> A little bit....

>> Amazon. But that's what it's doing, it's got a robotic arm, it's got technology built into it. Explain some of the tech.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> So technically is, I'll walk through the experience of the user. The user goes in and their mobile app places an order and presents themselves. We have obviously some age restricted product, they have to do the age verification with that. But once the transaction is completed, then we can go ahead and provide the products to the store, to the consumer. But what that does, now we're learning what you would like to get next time you're at the store. We also are building data for what sells in January versus what sells in June. Next week is going to be a warm day, you as a store owner should stock more water versus less water because it's going to be a warm day. So all these analytics and all these data are being built and these stores are becoming smarter and smarter to a point that you don't even have to think anymore what to stock in the store.

>> Convenience store married to a vending machine with a brain like a genius, love that description it intersects. One of the things, Shahan, is that in these robotics conversations we're having with all the leaders on theCUBE and NYC Wired is, the confluence of tech, money and culture are coming together. There's a couple of things going on here I want to get your reaction to. One is, the motivation to do this is not just for profit, there's also other motivating factors cultural. Gated communities want keep it inside their gates so their kids don't go outside, maybe crime in certain areas or just convenience. There is a lot of motivations here, not just money making.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> That's absolutely true.

>> Share what you're seeing with this trend.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> So we hear from a lot of our customers from where they want their kids to have a control space and not to be exposed to outside facilities and they want to have the ability to watch what the kids are buying, so now they can control that process and have visibility to it. There are certain areas that they have a small population, they're not interested in the store as a profit center, but when they have 400 members of the community living in a small city, they want to have that. I shared with you, we had a situation in our leadership, we take 1 out of 10 customer service calls and there was a couple who called and they spoke Spanish and I don't speak Spanish, so we kind of talked a little bit and then I was telling them about the story a little bit and the mom starts crying and I'm thinking, "Oh God, did I say something wrong?"

>> What did she say?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> And so the dad says, "Give me a minute." I got back on the phone and I said, "I'm sorry if I said something wrong." And they said, "No, we had a convenience store, our son got shot a year ago," and mom was crying saying, "God, why didn't VenHub exist a year ago?" So all the privileges of having the large companies approach us, we're honored, we're privileged, we're excited about it, but we're also, as a duty to the community to provide a safe, secure places to work and interact with, those are what keeps us up and makes us work 16, 17, 18 hours a day.

>> Like I said, this whole new wave of entrepreneurship has got a cultural for good, but it's not a nonprofit. We still want to make money. We've seen that with theCUBE as well. It's like you can sidecar all these, and you can still do good with making money, and I think this is a great example. Because it's a cultural shift, because there was no unattended retail in the past. And so that always begs the question, I know I've said this a zillion times, I'm sure you have too, and you've probably heard this. You're walking in the city, you're somewhere, you're coming back from the gym, "Man, I wish it was I got a protein drink now." Or, "I wish I could get a bottle of Gatorade." So the notion of convenience shifts, it's not like the old days of, "Oh, I got to own a store, I got to run it," you could literally drop in for a quarter million dollars a structure and it's like local business.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Exactly.

>> And in areas that the local business knows is convenient, "Hey, we know this is a place where there's a hair shop and a beauty shop and an Equinox gym," or whatever, "And we know this would be the perfect spot because there's foot traffic and a couple parking spaces available."

Shahan Ohanessian

>> It takes three parking spots, so you're absolutely correct, when we drop it in certain locations, the community is benefiting from it. But there's also, the reverse side of it is where, if the shopping centers are not getting enough traffic, the store is so attractive, it's so smart, it's so cool to interact with, it's bringing traffic. So the existing merchants are also benefiting from the smart stores coming too them.

>> Yeah, I mean, who doesn't love convenience? Amazon has Just Walk Out, before it was called Amazon Go, I know you have pedigree from Amazon, share your background because there is kind of a reason how you got here. You had Amazon experience in multiple aspects of the business, you have some Amazon leaders in your company board, so there's some Amazon DNA in here, share... Because I think that's a relevant... Because Amazon's done an amazing set of work, plowing the fields, got the scar tissue. I'm sure you got some from living the every day's day one. You mentioned day one. I'm like, "Oh, he worked at Amazon. No one says that unless they worked at AWS." Day one is an Amazon reference to Jeff Bezos and now Andy Jassy's, "Every day is day one," which is be entrepreneurial. What's the Amazon story? How did you get here?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> So we were involved in the early stages, early 2010s on the logistics side of it, the delivery side of it and we became a very large partner of Amazon. They had a lot of trust in us because we took a project and made it successful and then there's some certain areas of challenges, whatever that division was, we worked with them. And so we built an amazing partnership. And so that amazing partnership, we built a lot of relationship and that's why some of our board members are Amazonians.

>> But did you work at Amazon?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> I was on the vendor side of Amazon.

>> Okay, so you worked with Amazon, which they're very particular about?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Very much so.

>> You're a strategic vendor.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> That is correct. And alcohol deliveries of Amazon, we were the ones who were in charge of it because they wanted to be white gloved and they wanted to make sure it was done the right way, so we were involved in that and we made sure it was successful before it was released to the public. But those privileges, and those disciplines, are the same disciplines that we have right now at VenHub. So we're launching, we're wanting to have it, make sure it's fully controlled. We want to make sure that the Amazon story, the VenHub story, if the consumer is satisfied in making the consumer happy, they will come. So that's one of those things that we learned from there when we're implementing it.

>> And you made it really good. People are waving to the arms, and soon to be humanoids I'd imagine. But the convenience is about the transaction. It's smooth, it's elegant, and it's kind of cool to get served by a robot. I mean-

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Exactly....

>> people have got their cell phones out doing selfies. I mean, this is the cultural impact to this generation. I mean doing selfies, "Hey, a robot just served me." It's like, we had horse and buggy, "Look at this, a car," right? I mean, in a way that's what's happening.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> That's true. And we've had situations where you see a grandpa and a grandson walking by and grandpa's downloading the app and the grandson picks up the phone and then just orders it because it's a second language to them.

>> Yeah, yeah, "Thanks grandpa of putting your credit card down."

Shahan Ohanessian

>> But for the newer generation, for the younger generation, it's not a new language for them, that's the world they've lived through. We also had situations where... We had a situation where mom and a beautiful young girl that was going to school, they stopped by to pick up something before the school and then they went back and sat in the car and then you see mom and the young girl, maybe she was eight years old, she ran back to the store and she hugged the store because she loved that experience, and that's the loving experience. And our vertical today is, the convenience store. The second vertical, it could be smart lockers, it could be prescription deliveries, it could be auto parts, it could be flowers, anything. As the vision system grows and our muscles within our system grows, like Amazon with books, then digital music and so on and so forth, we're building our muscle for other verticals.

>> Yeah. There's a lot of leverage in the operation, operational consistency. Talk about some of the business momentum. How many stores, are these stores out there now? Like I said, we showed the graph of the backlog, you got orders. I mean now you got success, now you got to execute or die. It's day one, you said. What are some of the stats?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Well die is not an option.

>> Of course.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> I'm super competitive, so that's not an option. So how do we grow? First we got to grow smart and we got to grow, make sure the brand is there. So we've always been transparent with our customers. Let us take a couple of baby steps and then we'll take a little bit bigger steps and our customers are super fans and they're loyal to us, so they're allowing us to take our baby steps and we learn from it. So those are opportunities that we have to increase our muscle strength. From that point forward is, from day one when we started, day one again, we started the processes, I told our team I want a sexy store to be similar to an Apple product. So I want a very, very attractive store, but I also want it to be a McDonald's repeatability because you get a McDonald's in Seattle versus Boston versus New York, it's going to be the same McDonald's.

>> So consistency in large franchises like this, although it's not a traditional franchise, you monetize differently than that.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Exactly.

>> They can just buy it right out.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Exactly. And we install it for them. So if you happen to be one of the installers for VenHub and so am I, and you are the greatest installer and I'm the worst installer, we can't be any different because the vision system doesn't allow you to make mistakes. The AI vision system says, "Hey Shahan, this angle is not right, you've got to do it the right way." So that's what we are striving for is an amazing store, an amazing beautiful store, amazing technology and then being able to rapidly grow. So the rapid growth is not an issue, but the technology has to grow with it and we're working our butts off to make it happen.

>> Take me through some of the economics, 250K base cost to get your store, there's a SaaS fee, that's the investment side, a very low bar, not a lot of money considering what the upside is. What is the upside? What are some of the average sell throughs you're seeing? Have you looked at some of the unit economics for the owner, if I did this? I mean I could see a place in Palo Alto that'd be perfect, right next to the high school, obviously. Or Stanford's right there. So I mean, obviously, talented country. But anyway, what's the economics on the sell-through? I see pre-packaged goods, so you're not a lot of issues with food and health and safety, board of health or whatever. So it's all clean. What's the numbers look like? Can you share some of the things that people can expect? When's the payback on the investment? What does some of the data look like?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Right, that's a great question. So it all depends on the location and why you're putting the store into that location. So we have certain stores that are making several thousand dollars a day. So the break even is around 200,000 a year. So several thousand a day, you can do the math, they're making a lot of profits because the profit margin on the store, there's no cost of employees, there's no workman's comp, there's no shrinkage, there's no theft because it's bulletproof glass, there's steel framing, so no one's getting in there. So it's purely just based, you buy a product for a dollar and sell for a $1.30, that's your 30% profit margin. There are certain stores that are in communities where maybe it's a rougher community where they don't want to be open 24 hours, where before they were only working eight hours because of the roughness of the area, but now they can be open 24 hours because the robots are fully secured and the framing is fully secured. So every store has its own history and its own foot traffic and its own economics. But ultimately whatever you look at the math, the math works out substantially better than an existing retail. And whether we like it or not in this world, in the next 5 years to 10 years, unattended retail is going to be dominating all retail.

>> Yeah, it's a great category. Unattended retail definitely is here. There are situations for all the reasons you mentioned, , but for the boutiques, yeah those union will still be there. Talk about what your goals are because now that you've got the momentum, you've got the backlog, you've got a lot of pressure, profit's going to be great, so congratulations on that. Any competition coming in? Any signs of barriers? Your margin is my opportunity, I've heard that before. How are you looking at the competitive barriers, is it the tech? Is there a moat here? I mean, because it sounds like there's, obviously robotics, that's a breakthrough, computer vision, cloud, SaaS, analytics, where's the secret sauce?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> The combination of all that is secret sauce. We have multiple patents and 30 plus patents that we have. We're building large, large worldwide clients have done their due diligence. There's nothing in the back coming behind us. And then they do great. We shouldn't be focusing on what's in the rearview mirror, we should be focusing on our own destiny. How do we make ourselves better? How do we make ourselves stronger? How do we make our customers more satisfied? How do we make our owners more profitable? And if we accomplish that, the rest doesn't matter.

>> And what's your vision? As you said, you have multiple acts here. Act one is, take baby steps, get the beach head, add some other things like pharmacy. Is there a bigger vision that you have?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> So on the fixed store, which we are witnessing today is our convenience store, then we'll go to the smart pharmacies, smart lockers, smart auto parts, smart beauty supplies and so on and so forth. The second skew of the business will be a mobile skew where lots of sports arenas, concerts, events are reaching out saying, "Hey, give me a solution. We love your solution, we want to unattended retail, but today in the morning we have this event, so we want this product. In the evening we have that event, we want that product." So we can switch that product on the spot without having to change a whole bunch of stuff.

>> And that's the vending machine side of it, dynamic, agile, but the physical unattended, that's the wheelhouse.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Exactly. And in a very small confined space, we can carry 500 to 900 SKUs where if you had to build a 900 SKU facility, it'll cost you a million and a half dollars or plus, a couple more years and a boatload of attendees where we don't have to deal with that at all. We can get it done, install it within five days.

>> Okay, so let's just say I want to drop this in to Palo Alto, my hometown. I got to come up with 250K, which Palo Alto's, there's a lot of investors there, but potentially a hit for myself. What does it look like? Do I Dropship in? Am I Dropshipping in a container? Is it self-contained, is it built on site? What's the footprint? Just because you have an Apple-esque store look vibe to it. Okay, I saw the product. What does the deployment look like and how fast do I get up to speed? What's the playbook? Give me the workflow.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Great question. So you let us know you want a store, and assuming you're in a pipeline that already-

>> The queues are the line.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Yeah.

>> .

Shahan Ohanessian

>> So we bring the store to your facility's shrunk wrap with, the housing is collapsible and then the robots are delivered at the same time. The installation process takes about four days, calibration takes about a day, a final day of testing and literally within the seventh day we're having a grand opening for you. It's never been done in history where you can go from zero to hero in seven days and that's the day one of operations, seven days into the Dropship.

>> Yeah, that's awesome. Just kind another technical question, on the AI, is it limited to the packaged goods that you mentioned, a convenience store. Let's just say Palo Alto's got a unique culture, people like to buy tech there. Can I just put a couple iPhones in there and swap out Doritos? I mean what do I... I mean, it sounds like there's a shelf space constraint that's bigger than most. Do I have to train the AI to know that that's... Can I manage inventory myself or is that...

Shahan Ohanessian

>> In the future you can globally manage the inventory, today we have a limited inventory you can manage, but our stores in North Hollywood have phone chargers and they have a bunch of different batteries and and so forth.

>> So they do put other stuff in there.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> They have a different bunch of stuff in there. But as our system grows, our vision system grows, our inventory model grows and literally the store will tell you, "It's Saturday, I sold more batteries." So at nights when everybody's sleeping, it'll put the battery in front. If the window's dirty, it'll clean up the window so when there's no customers-

>> The arm literally does the inventory placement or stocking strategies, shelf strategies.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Yes. That's the long-term vision is to have it truly self-

>> Yeah. That's the genius part of the marriage.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> That's correct.

>> The convenience store and vending machine have a baby and it's a genius.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> It's a genius baby.

>> All right, what's the plans for funding for you guys, obviously every banker must be banging on your door, you got orders, you can finance those orders, you have backlog. What's your strategy relative to financing? I know you did a crowdfunding, you guys did some self-funding right? On the initial stage?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Yes.

>> Are you at profitable now? Obviously you got orders, they prepay. I mean give me some of the data.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> There's prepayment coming in from the pre-orders. We are profitable. We don't lose money. I don't know how to run a negative business. So we've been always profitable, obviously not through the R&D side, but the minute we start deploying the stores, we're profitable. Our vision is to be a public company. We made an announcement that we want to be a public company. We're looking at different strategies. Fortunately, like you said, people are approaching us more than us approaching them and that's an honor and privilege, and we don't take it lightly, we're not abusing it, but we owe it to our consumers, we owe it to our store owners, we owe it to our crowdfunding shareholders to do the right thing and not for the short-term, but the long term vision. This is a dominating industry and it's a groundbreaking industry that's going to be, it's not only here for the weeks or years to come, it's going to be for the centuries to come and how do we lead that world?

>> And you guys have a lot of brand awareness, with those kinds of dots I saw all over the United States, obviously major convenient areas to be had, low cost to get into the business, obviously upside. Do you guys could look at competing, overlaying the geo space? Like okay, "I got five clusters going on there, the neighborhood's saturated," and I'm just getting ahead of myself here, but I wanted to go down that-

Shahan Ohanessian

>> That's a great question. So we are not going to over saturate the territory, we're going to allow space for that store owner, in Manhattan being five blocks away, that's more than enough of an example.

>> That's a desert if you want that Gatorade or protein drink.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Right, but so-

>> There's like five gyms too by the way, going around here too.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> But in certain cities, five blocks away, it's really next door to each other. So we have all the analytics where we'll continue working with the analytics, we'll work with our customers. Besides having this consumer being happy, our success is making our customers-

>> All the owners.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> The owners being happy.

>> Owners, and in the end, user customer.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Right.

>> All right, so now my final question on getting my whole deep dive due diligence here for me buying the stock when you go public is, okay, VenHub, great brand name, VenHub, Venconvenient Hub, whatever you want to call it, whatever name, we'll help people work on that. But what if I wanted to do a CUBE store and rebranded theCUBE? Do you allow rebranding or co-branding?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> A hundred percent.

>> So you do?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Yeah, it's your choice. It's your store, you're buying it. If you want to call VenHub, obviously we have certain requirements you have to follow.

>> Image mark, probably some attribution.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Exactly. And also to do with cleanliness and keeping and so on and so forth. But if you want to have theCUBEHub for example, then it's your store. We'll deliver it to you. You'll give us your brand logo and stuff and we'll have it installed for you. You'll choose whether you want blue or green or whatever color you want and we'll get a... The app will also be white labeled for you, but you'll be in the app store within our app system.

>> Yeah, I mean, Ken, we're going to get this into Vegas, but we're going to go to the same venues, Moscone, Javits, a little penetration of theCUBE inside those venues.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> And shortly, we'll be announcing our Vegas deployment within the next week or so.

>> So you have one going on in Vegas?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Yes, sir.

>> Can you give us a little teaser on where on the strip it is, or?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Good places.

>> Well, thank you for coming on theCUBE and congratulations.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Thank you, thank you so much.

>> Great to have you as part of our CUBE-

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Appreciate it....

>> and the NYSE Wired networking community. It's an open community of experts like yourself. So I really appreciate you one, sharing the story. And I love the breakthrough. Again, unattended retail, everyone's talking about it, but nobody's doing it. An arm today, a humanoid tomorrow, maybe?

Shahan Ohanessian

>> Of course.

>> I mean, come on now you can bow in Japan if you wanted, it can shake hands, high five, wave to the crowd.

Shahan Ohanessian

>> And also that's the humanoid where you can take the existing retail and convert it to the humanoid. So lots of opportunities. This is a great venue, an amazing tour, an amazing space. Congrats on the broadcast. And I can't wait to do it again with you.

>> Yeah, I can't wait either. Great to keep in touch, great to know you. Again. entrepreneurship, we've been saying this, new opportunities are emerging, whether it's manufacturing, retail, software development, as with agentic systems, robotics and AI is actually a cultural shift as well as the technology revolution. Again, opportunities are everywhere. And of course theCUBE, theCUBEHub coming soon, retail, buy some CUBE mugs, maybe. That's coming soon. Well, thanks for watching Again, we're here at the NYSE Live. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.