Soul Robotics: Mastering B2B Autonomous Driving for Manufacturing & Logistics

As Captain of Soul Robotics, I've navigated the company through 100+ projects, focusing on one killer product to revolutionize B2B autonomous driving for industries like finished vehicle logistics and warehouses.

* The speaker is Hin Lee, captain of Soul Robotics, a B2B autonomous driving company.
* Soul Robotics provides autonomous driving services in areas with driver shortages, such as finished vehicle logistics and logistics centers.
* The company has employees from 13 different nationalities and has been focusing on B2B autonomous driving for the past 3-4 years.
* Hin Lee grew up in Korea and went to Penn State to study mechanical engineering with the intention of building robots, but later realized that robotics is more of a software problem than a hardware
* After graduating, Lee started studying AI and self-driving with a group of people and founded Soul Robotics in 2017 with four co-founders.
* The company's first business model was to sell their computer vision technology to OEMs, but they soon realized that the car makers moved slowly and were conservative.
* Soul Robotics then worked on 100 different autonomous driving projects as an outsourcing company, but many of these projects did not scale.
* The company's first major client was BMW, who wanted to solve the problem of manually picking up cars and driving them into train stations.
* B2B autonomous driving is like a B2B cloud system for societies to operate on, and Soul Robotics is the backend autonomous driving system for society.
* The difference between an average autonomous driving system and the best one may be 100:1, and Soul Robotics' technology is unique because it predominantly uses lidar installed around infrastructure
* This infrastructure system allows for more sensors to be installed closer together, which can mitigate shortages and handle heavy weather scenarios better than conventional methods.
* The company's autonomy 3 infrastructure technology also solves the problem of moving fleets of cars safely, which is critical for B2B use cases.
* Soul Robotics did not take the path of least resistance but instead took a step-by-step approach to solve the problem at hand.
* The company's system is extremely cheap to deploy compared to conventional methods because it only requires a small parking lot with handful of sensors to move hundreds of cars simultaneously.
* CES and Nvidia are looking into fiscal AI, which is an AI agent going all the way to actuating robotic arms, and physical AI will eventually get there as well.
* Tesla and Waymo have stuck to their original design for longer than anybody else with extremely talented groups of engineers, and Soul Robotics admires that.
* There are many sectors that require robotics for B2B use cases, such as tunnel driving, and the company is one of the few in the world providing autonomous driving technology to multiple car makers
* Soul Robotics wants to rebrand itself with the domain name "robotics.te" to signify its focus on hardcore robotics, especially autonomous driving.
* The driver shortage is severe in Korea and Asia, and the company aims to provide robust autonomous driving technology to the backbone industry.
* Soul Robotics is based in Korea and wants to solve autonomous driving problems across different domains of industry.

Source: EO via YouTube

❓ What do you think? What is the most critical step towards successfully pivoting a company, and how does Hin Lee's experience with Soul Robotics illustrate this concept? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!