Countless startups are trying to solve hard robotics problems in industry. But few are looking to bring the tech into homes.<\/p>\n
Well, few except for Matic<\/a>.<\/p>\n A relatively new venture founded by Navneet Dalal, an ex-Google research scientist, Matic, formerly known as Matician, is developing robots that can navigate homes to clean \u201cmore like a human,\u201d as Dalal puts it.<\/p>\n Matic today revealed that it\u2019s raised $29.5 million inclusive of a $24 million Series A led by a who\u2019s who of tech luminaries, including GitHub co-founder Nat Friedman, Stripe co-founders John and Patrick Collison, Quora CEO Adam D\u2019Angelo and Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey.<\/p>\n Dalal co-founded Matic in 2017 with Mehul Nariyawala, previously a lead product manager at Nest, where he oversaw Nest\u2019s security camera portfolio.<\/p>\n Dalal and Nariyawala met while working at Like.com, a computer vision startup that Google acquired<\/a> in 2010, and ended up co-launching the webcam-based gesture recognition platform Flutter together. (Flutter also wound up being acquired by Google<\/a>, coincidentally.)<\/p>\n Dalal and Nariyawala delved into the indoor robotics space after realizing that the field lacked 3D maps for precise navigation \u2014 at least from where they were standing.<\/p>\n \u201cJust as autonomous vehicles need GPS and Google Street View Maps to navigate, fully autonomous indoor robots require precise understanding of their location on high-fidelity, Street View-like 3D maps of the constantly-changing indoor world,\u201d Dalal told TechCrunch in an email interview. \u201cWe concluded that indoor robots needed on-device mapping capabilities to address privacy, latency and changing indoor environments.\u201d<\/p>\n Matic\u2019s vacuum uses an array of cameras to map spaces \u2014 and understand where it is in them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Early on, Matic focused on building robot vacuums \u2014 but not because Dalal, who serves as the company\u2019s CEO, saw Matic competing with the iRobots and Evocavs of the world. Rather, floor-cleaning robots provided a convenient means to thoroughly map indoor spaces, he and Nariyawala believed.<\/p>\n \u201cRobot vacuums became our initial focus due to their need to cover every inch of indoor surfaces, making them ideal for mapping,\u201d Dalal said. \u201cMoreover, the floor-cleaning robot market was ripe for innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n Amazon\u2019s $1.7 billion purchase<\/a> of iRobot last year highlights just how valuable this indoor map data is perceived to be. iRobot, whose more recent robot vacuums capture detailed layouts of the homes they clean, reportedly<\/a> once considered sharing mapping data with tech companies to develop more contextually aware smart home devices and AI assistants.<\/p>\n Ambitiously, Matic sought to design a \u201cfully autonomous\u201d robot that could patrol a home, automatically adjust how it cleaned based on different floor types and stains and \u201cremember\u201d which routes it took to continuously self-improve.<\/p>\n Years of R&D yielded the eponymous Matic vacuum, which relies on camera-based AI to map and navigate homes (ostensibly at 1.5-centimeter precision), recognize objects and switch between vacuuming and mopping based on what it observes.<\/p>\n Matic isn\u2019t yet available for purchase. But Dalal and Nariyawala seeded it to friends and family beginning in April, and subsequently launched axf small number of customer field and beta trials.<\/p>\n \u201cMatic was inspired by busy working parents who want to live in a tidy home, but don\u2019t want to spend their limited free time cleaning,\u201d Dalal said. \u201cIt\u2019s the first fully autonomous floor cleaning robot that continuously learns and adapts to users\u2019 cleaning preferences without ever compromising their privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of bold claims in that statement. But on the subject of privacy, Matic does indeed \u2014 or at least claims to \u2014 ensure data doesn\u2019t leave a customer\u2019s home.<\/p>\n All processing happens on the robot (on hardware \u201cequivalent to an iPhone 6,\u201d Dalal says), and mapping and telemetry data is saved locally, not in the cloud, unless users opt in to sharing. Matic doesn\u2019t even require an internet connection to get up and running \u2014 only a smartphone paired over a local Wi-Fi network.<\/p>\n The Matic vacuum understands an array of voice commands and gestures for fine-grained control. And \u2014 unlike some robot vacuums in the market \u2014 it can pick up cleaning tasks where it left off in the event that it\u2019s interrupted (say, by a wayward pet).<\/p>\n Dalal says that Matic can also prioritize areas to clean depending on factors like the time of day and nearby rooms and furniture.<\/p>\n \u201cLike a human, fully autonomous floor-cleaning robot should remember which areas get dirty most frequently and clean there first,\u201d Dalal said. \u201cIt should know that, after we cook and eat meals, the kitchen and dining areas are dirty \u2014 and clean those areas automatically when we finish eating. It should know that kids and dogs go in and out of the backyard all the time, so maybe clean near the backyard door five times a day but underneath the bed once a week is fine.\u201d<\/p>\n Can all this navigational lifting be accomplished with cameras alone? Dalal insists that it can, despite the fact that many of the more capable robot vacuums on the market rely on lasers, lidar or both to simultaneously localize and map spaces.<\/p>\n The Matic\u2019s vacuum\u2019s progress can be visualized from the companion app for iOS.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIn order to run all the necessary algorithms, from 3D depth to semantics to \u2026 controls and navigation, on the robot, we had to vertically integrate and hyper-optimize the entire codebase,\u201d Dalal said, \u201cfrom the modifying kernel to building a first-of-its-kind iOS app with live 3D mapping. This enables us to deliver an affordable robot to our customers that solves a real problem with full autonomy.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether the tech works as well as promised or not, Matic costs a pretty penny.<\/p>\n The robot starts at $1,795; it\u2019ll be available at the discounted price of $1,495 for a limited time when preorders begin on November 2. And it every purchase requires a $75-per-month membership, which includes hardware upgrades, repairs and maintenance but can\u2019t be canceled without forfeiting the vacuum to Matic (pre-order customers get the first year free).<\/p>\n For comparison, iRobot\u2019s most expensive vacuum is $1,399. The Roborock \u2014 a high-end rival \u2014 is $1,600. Neither have a membership fee \u2014 nor onerous cancelation terms attached to that fee.<\/p>\n To sweeten the deal somewhat, Matic\u2019s throwing in a year\u2019s supply of HEPA bags and \u201cconsumables refills\u201d as well as an extended warranty. But even if the startups hits its shipping target of March 2024. there\u2019s a lot of unknowns \u2014 and risks \u2014 involved in home robotics.<\/p>\n Just this year, robot vacuum startup Neato shut down<\/a> after failing to reach its internal sales goals. Mayfield Robotics<\/a>, which hoped to sell a home robot in partnership with Bosch, ceased operations before shipping a single unit to early customers. Meanwhile, Amazon\u2019s struggled with Astro<\/a>, its first robot-for-the-home attempt, which months after being unveiled still isn\u2019t available to the general public.<\/p>\n Dalal and Nariyawala are attempting to keep overhead reasonable by maintaining a modest team \u2014 around 60 people (although Dalal says Matic\u2019s headcount will probably land between 65 to 70 by year\u2019s end). And, for what it\u2019s worth, they\u2019re confident enough in Matic\u2019s ability to succeed that they\u2019re already planning a \u201cnext set\u201d of robotics products.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the short term, we\u2019ll be competing with the first generation of \u2018disc-robot\u2019 makers,\u201d Dalal said. \u201cBut our main competition is with anyone building fully autonomous indoor robots including humanoids \u2026 We\u2019ve solved the bottlenecks to make fully autonomous indoor robots ubiquitous and built a software stack that can apply to any indoor robotics application.\u201d<\/p>\n Time will tell whether that optimism was misguided or well-informed.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"Mantic](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/an-animated-gif-showing-a-small-boxy-black-and-white-vacuuming-robot-in-a-living-room-alternating-with-a-virtual-3d-view-shown-o.webp\")
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