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Noah Ready-Campbell

Founder & CEO

Built Robotics

play_circle_outline Robots dig trenches for buried cable and drive piles into the ground

play_circle_outline Enhancing Productivity: Overnight Work and Adaptation to Challenging Terrain by Robots

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Noah Ready-Cambell, Built Robotics

Noah Ready-Campbell

Founder & CEO Built Robotics

In this video, Noah Ready-Campbell, CEO of Built Robotics, joins the live stream at theCUBE’s NYSE New York City studio during the Wired Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Media Week. Ready-Campbell provides an insightful discussion on the innovative robotics solutions employed at Built Robotics to revolutionize the construction of solar farms.

Ready-Campbell brings expertise in both construction and technology, having previously worked at Google and started their own eCommerce company. Hosts from theCUBE Research lead an engaging conversation abou... Read more

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Noah Ready-Cambell, Built Robotics

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>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here at our NYSE New York City studio as part of theCUBE and the NYSE Wired community, an open community building on content and podcast knowledge, sharing here from our guests. Got a great lineup with the Citi Robotics AI Leader series we're putting on all week, all the best people coming in, sharing what they're working on, the innovations that's happening. Noah Ready-Campbell is here, the CEO of Built Robotics, sporting the hat. Good swag, I've got to say. Love the swag. Welcome, Noah, to theCUBE podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah, thanks, John. Happy to be here.

>> The robotics thing's hot. First of all, who doesn't like robotics, number one? Plus on the tech side, the whole AI wave. You've got Jensen Huang at Nvidia. All he talks about is robots, and that's hardcore factories and things of that nature. Digital twins, a lot of data, a lot of AI. You guys are doing something pretty practical and still advanced. Got some great funding. Founders Fund, NEA, Tiger Global, still growing. Here at the Citi Conference, I'm sure you're going to have more action. Give context. What do you guys do? What's the story? What's the core value proposition?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Sure, yeah. We build robots to help construct solar farms. So if you look at the energy mix out there today in the US, it's shifting really hard to solar. Even five years ago, solar was alternative energy. Today it's actually the majority of the new energy capacity that's being constructed on the grid. So it's really the story for how we're going to provide the electricity for AI, for electric cars, for all the rest.

>> Yeah, I mean data centers. Where are they going? Phoenix, Texas.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> That's right.

>> What's the common thread there? More sun.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> That's right. Very cheap electricity.

>> And what's the innovation that you guys are executing on? Solar's getting better. There's always been mechanical issues involved in setting up. Is this kind of where this hits?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah. Something interesting has happened in the last couple of years, where now modules are less than half the cost of building a solar farm, and that's just because we're continuing to walk down the cost curve for solar panels. What that means is that construction is actually the majority of the cost of putting a new solar farm in. And so what we do is we build robots to help bring that cost down, make it safer, make it more efficient.

>> Talk about the robot packaging, size, scope, scope the magnitude of what's going on.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> So we have two products in market. We have a robot that digs trenches for buried cable. On a big solar farm, there can be hundreds of miles of buried electrical cables, so somebody's got to put the trenches in and get those cables in the ground. And then our newer product is a pile driving robot, so it can carry these steel beams, what are called piles, and carry them out into the field and drive them into the ground. It can carry over 200 piles, so machine together with its stabilizer robot weighs over 150,000 pounds.

>> So this is high-end industrial gear.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah.

>> This is not like clean my house robot.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> No, they look like transformers kind of.

>> That's cool. How did this all get started? This is an unbelievable story.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah. I grew up around construction. My family's in construction. My grandfather was an architect, my dad was a carpenter. I worked for my dad every summer in high school and absolutely hated it at the time, just waking up early.

>> We have that robot make that early call.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Exactly, exactly. But I think that I also came away with an appreciation for the importance of building something tangible, something that you can actually look at, that's going to be there after you're gone. Fast-forward, I studied engineering in college, worked at Google. That was my first job out of school. And then my first startup, I sold to eBay in the eCommerce space. So I was a second time entrepreneur and when I was looking around for my next company, I really wanted to go back to construction just because it was something that meant something to me, and I got really passionate about AI and robotics. It just felt like something interesting was happening there and figured out a way to marry the two.

>> What I'd love to know about that story is that robotics has always been kind of like, I'm not going to say for the rich, but all the high-end factories with digital twins, mentioned some of that Nvidia earlier. Google's got deep pockets. They can pound at a problem for whatever. But now that democratization wave is coming, what's your perspective on that? Because this is not like, "Hey, I was in the robotics club." You're doing high-end industrial engineering meets software, so it's almost a cross-disciplinary continuum.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Very cross-disciplinary, yeah.

>> Talk about that importance of that because we're seeing the successes of robotics and AI is really in the hardware/software integrations are super valuable and seems to be the formula of the template. What's your reaction to that?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> No. Yeah, you very much need to be a master of both, and I like robotics because it feels like you're at the cutting edge of so many different disciplines. So mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, AI, software, and we bring all that together in order to make our products effective for our customers in the field.

>> What's the hardest challenge you guys have to overcome? The big problem you're solving?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> These are giant machines. So 150,000 pounds. It's an arm that's like 35 feet long. But our customers demand us to install these piles within a couple millimeters of the design elevation. So getting that precision on a machine that size is very challenging.

>> It is a transformer. My mind's like, okay, I'd love to see a photo of it. It must be monstrous. How many are out in the field right now?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Undisclosed. Yeah, we're still ramping up right now, but we've deployed on over 30 projects now. Fortunate to work with some really great construction companies, and we have a team in Australia as well, so we've been deploying both to the US and Australia.

>> How's the results been? Can you tell us some stories about some of the use cases and specifics? You can generalize.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah, I think customers overall really like it. There's always a skepticism when we show up on a project. Construction is-

>> What kind of skepticism? Like, what the hell is this, or will this work?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> I think it's a little like, "Why are you wasting my time with this? I'm already behind schedule and over budget. Get this innovation crap out of here." But a big part of our culture at Built Robotics is we always remember that we're there to deliver a product for the customer at the end of the day. We call it construction hustle. And so even there have been times where the robot does have an issue and I'll climb into the cab of the excavator and just get the work done myself because the customer's relying on it and there's a crew that's going to come in behind us. They're expecting the work to be done correctly and to be done on time. So we always make sure that we deliver that.

>> That's called getting hands-on in the cab. That's truly, that's Iron Man, the big Iron Man one where the guy's in there. Talk about the technology involved. Can you share some of the data challenges, what you guys are doing with some of the componentry in building these things? Are they reasoning? Obviously precision's been a big part of it. What's involved?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah. One thing that I think is interesting is safety. We think a ton about safety. We have an eight-layer safety system that has really worked very well. It's something we developed over the years. Proud to share that we have zero safety incidents related to our robots operating. So it's something that I think is tried and true at this point. A lot of people look at AI and they have a hard time figuring out how to combine an AI model that might behave in an unexpected way with a safety-critical environment. And so we figured out how to do that. We figured out how to gather the data and create the test cases in order to ensure that the robots can work safely. But huge data challenges there.

>> Are there certain use cases that are jumping out at you right now? Obviously moving things around, one. Road construction might be one. You mentioned digging trenches. I can imagine excavation.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Solar, solar's really where we're focused. Solar's the biggest thing happening in construction right now. It's just booming. I've never-

>> Just demand-wise.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah. Yeah. The amount of solar that needs to get built over the next 10 years is larger than all of the solar farms that exist in the country today.

>> Share with the folks what's going on with solar farms just anecdotally. Some people think, oh, they drive on the freeway, they see a bunch of solar farms. We live in California, so you see them everywhere. Is the advancements that big right now? Are there big breakthroughs going on in solar? Gives that growth and the economics on solar, all that stuff from a data center. You're talking about nuclear power on one hand and solar delivering the payload.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah, so the interesting thing about solar is that for a long time it was alternative energy, as I mentioned before, and it was expensive, so we needed subsidies, tax credits, things like that in order to make it make sense. Now it's the cheapest form of electricity in most of the country. So in Florida and Arizona and Texas, it's even cheaper than natural gas power plants actually. So it cuts across all different sides of the political spectrum. Everybody wants cheap air conditioning, right? So yeah, I don't see it slowing down anytime soon.

>> You said you worked at Google, so you know there's a big data center build-out going on, and you've seen the news, Abilene, Texas.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yes.

>> Silicon Sands in Phoenix area. TSMC's going have eight plants there. I think we broke that story. That's massive.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yes.

>> Massive construction. Billions of dollars. What are some of the yields savings-wise that you guys are bringing to the table? Obviously speed, productivity.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah, safety.

>> Cost efficiency, safety. What are some of the key bullet points?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah, I think you hit them. And another big one is that the robots can work overnight. So if you need to accelerate schedule, you're running behind, having that ability to just deploy the robots overnight has been huge. We can get two, 3x more productivity.

>> So are you building the robots? Are you outsourcing that, or are you guys working with suppliers? How does the construction of a robot that size come to bear?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> What we do is we buy an off-the-shelf piece of construction equipment and then we kind of upgrade it with our own AI-powered exosystem. So it's very similar to what Waymo does with their cars. They're not manufacturing the cars. And then we kind of go through this upgrade process and then we deploy the robots out in the field with our customers.

>> What's the biggest thing you've learned so far in this, in terms of breakthroughs, observations, scar tissue, what's been some of the learnings? I mean, it's really a cutting edge area, obviously obvious advantages.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> I think the biggest thing is just that hard tech R&D like this, it takes time. Waymo was, I think created in 2009, if I'm not mistaken, so 16 years ago now, and for a while it looked like Google was just shoveling billions and billions of dollars into a furnace there. But now I think they've created a pretty remarkable product.

>> And tipping point is always in the view. Trying to figure out where that tipping point is. For you, what's the tipping point in your mind?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> I think we've achieved that now, but it's basically when the robots can fit into the existing workflow on a job site in terms of quality, in terms of production rate, compared with traditional human crews. We've hit that and now install superintendents, pile foreman. They look at the robots and they think, wow, that's a good way to put steel in the ground.

>> Yeah. What's the onboarding process? Let's just say that I got a huge solar farm contract. I got OpenAI hiring me up to run, GC the job. What is the pitch, and are they calling you?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yes. Yeah. No, we've been fortunate to, we've actually done essentially zero outbound over the years. We have a website and a contact form, and people have reached out to us. Because I think a lot of construction companies are looking for technology. I think people might look at the construction industry and think, oh, it's kind of a tech-averse industry. I don't think that's true. I think it's just a very pragmatic industry and they don't really have time or budget for dealing with half-baked stuff that doesn't really work.

>> I owe time on a job site. It's like you were there. I've done some construction jobs in college summers. No one's sitting on their ass.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> No. Right. Exactly.

>> You know what I'm talking about.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Exactly.

>> You could be loafing. That's a different story.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yes.

>> But that's what humans do. But robots don't loaf. I mean, they're on-task.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah. Yeah. No, smoke breaks for robots.

>> No smoke breaks. All right, so what's the coolest thing that you're working on right now?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> I think just scaling the fleet. So yeah, getting more bots out in the field. Working overnight, that's something that we've kind of dabbled in the last couple of years, but it's now kind of standard for us. Continuing to improve production rates, continuing to improve precision. One actually kind of interesting anecdote is we recently deployed on a project where the grade was 11.5%, which if you're like a cyclist or anything, you know that's a pretty steep grade. And contractually, we were only supposed to be on up to 6%, but we got out there and we're like, well, let's see if the robot can handle it. And it was able to.

>> Really?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> It was just a little slower because it wasn't used to being so off balance, but the system was able to adapt.

>> I'm sure everyone was on point on that one and see if it works.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah, that was exciting.

>> That's fun. What are some of the things you're trying to focus on now? Obviously you're here for the Citi thing in New York. We appreciate you coming by theCUBE here. What's your goal for the conference? Is it dev, financing? What's the, just-

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Building relationships. Yeah. I think, as I mentioned, I think there's huge rewards to be reaped for these hard tech companies, but it does take, it's a longer time horizon versus maybe a traditionally vertical SaaS business or consumer focused startup. So finding investors who are excited about that, who have that long-term vision.

>> Education, too. They need to understand that AI is not for the higher, high, high end, that these what would be white spaces are huge markets. Do you have a TAM that you see out there, or is-

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> It's hard. I mean, construction is so big. Yeah.

>> to even have a TAM.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> One fact I can leave you with, construction's the only major sector of the economy where labor productivity has been going down over the last 50 years. So we're actually worse at building in a sense than we were in the seventies. And the reason for that is mainly just that wages have gone up in order to keep pace with cost of living, but the means and methods haven't changed. So there's just this massive mega tailwind that I think is powering interest in our robots.

>> So squeezing productivity out of the human capital. Have you seen shifts in the human behavior in terms of what's happening on the job site? Has the classic creative kicked in, or what has been the impact to the robots?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> I think there's a little concern for sure, but at the same time, we've been fortunate to forge a relationship with the International Union of Operating Engineers, so one of the largest construction unions in the country, over 400,000 members. And I think it is really a credit to them and to their leadership for being very forward thinking and seeing, hey, these robots are actually tools, and those tools need to be operated by skilled operators.

>> And that skill is a new job.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> A new high paying job probably.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Exactly. Yeah.

>> Final question. What's the AI impact to you guys? Obviously the tailwind there, you're seeing certainly a lot of hype market with agents and whatnot, but you're starting to see real evidence of the confluence of AI hitting real world, democratizing, some people call it. Some people call it practical AI. How is that impacting what you guys do?

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> I mean, it's both core to our software, so we have a huge AI component to the stack that we are on, the autonomy stack, but it's also, I think, driving demand. So we've deployed on projects where ... Oh geez, sorry.

>> Orders are coming in right now. See, they have no outbound marketing.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> We've deployed on projects where it's actually like a data center that's designed to just suck all this power right from a solar farm. So it's both the supply and the demand side for us.

>> Awesome. Well, congratulations.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yeah, thank you.

>> I love your mission. Man, solar energy, certainly data centers are sold out. I say that. It's my words, but pretty much at capacity.

Noah Ready-Campbell

>> Yes.

>> More are coming, buildings, new stuff, new requirements coming in. Good job. Thanks for coming on. Great story. Yeah, being cool and relevant is a really good business model, is a great example here. Robotics going mainstream, really looking at areas where it's not just factories and high-end manufacturing. We're starting to see use cases where AI is making a difference. Robotics is causing value in the market with human labor, energy costs, all hitting the same kind of themes of AI, and of course theCUBE has got it covered. We're live stream in real time here. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.