Most Russian robotics companies are clustered in north-western Russia, i.e., in St. Petersburg and Moscow, which corresponds to the main business and financial centers of the federation.

The Russian Federation has a traditional and strong history in science and engineering. These days that pool of learning and manpower is much more open and accessible than it was during Soviet times. This change has brought with it goods from outside the Federation, increased competition, and less need for the country to produce all the machines and products that it needs.

Excluding sales and service distributors of Finnish, German, Korean and Japanese robot vendors, the number of Russian robotics companies does not appear to be large for the size of economy, but it is definitely growing.  Just over 10% of the companies we found are integrators, companies that design, engineer, develop and assist in the automation of their clients’ production sites. These integrators use robots manufactured outside the Russian Federation.

Russian robotics companies that we’ve found so far include: 38% startup companies (of which 2/3 are companies building robots for various uses and 1/3 are providing software or vision systems for robotics systems), 17% are providing service robots for governmental and corporate use, 8% are for space or defense, and 8% are education-related. The final 29% are ancillary businesses such as software developers, vision systems providers and component manufacturers.

Anxious to ensure that the robot revolution does not pass Russia by, the Skolkovo Innovation Centre that has been created near Moscow will ensure that robotics are firmly embedded in the innovation schema. The centre is designed to concentrate international intellectual capital in order to stimulate the development of break-through projects and technologies. As a result, many new startup companies are being formed.  Some of these are selected to become project participants of the centre, receiving extra assistance for quicker development. The Skolkovo Foundation provides infrastructure and resources, delivering effective services for companies that are project participants.

The Centre hosted a robotics conference in February 2013, to support research and development  in the field of robotics, particularly in the fields of personal and service robotics.  The conference brought together international experts, venture funds and research and scientific teams along with university students.  The 2013 conference saw the launch of the annual Skolkovo Robotics Challenge contest, which will fund the production of experimental prototypes.  A second conference is planned for 2014.

As for the less formal space, the country has three hacker / maker spaces which provide a focus for hobbyists and small businesses to collaborate, encouraging some sharing of ideas and technology in the robotics field.
1. In Ekaterinburg (Makeitlab, http://www.makeitlab.ru/)
2. In Moscow (Neuron, http://neuronspace.ru )
3. In St. Petersburg (Hackspace-spb, http://hackspb.ru/en)

There is definite Russian interest in the technical and market challenges that the field of robotics holds, and this is something that has interested investors – Dmitry Grishin and Dmitry Itskov to name a couple – and the government – hence their sponsorship of the Skolkovo Innovation Centre. Russia certainly has the technical knowledge and capabilities to contribute to the emerging robotics industry on the world stage and is beginning to do all they can to support the companies rising to the challenge.

Dmitry Grishin at the Skolkovo Robotics conference in Russia.

As part of our series on high-risk, high-reward robotics, and as a follow-up to his recent Robot’s Podcast interview, I asked entrepreneur and venture capitalist Dmitry Grishin to talk to us about how he manages risk in his global investment company Grishin Robotics. 

[HS]
How would you define high-risk, high-reward robotics from an investor’s perspective?

[DG]
I don’t look at companies in terms of ‘this is high risk’ and ‘this is low risk’. I have a different approach: I try to find a company where I believe in what they’re doing, where I believe in the founders, and I really believe that this company can be a great success.

I like to look at it from a pragmatic perspective, so first I want to know what kind of practical problem the company wants to solve. Second, I want to understand the market, because inside robotics you have a lot of smaller markets … telepresence, home automation, security, etc. So I want to know how big this market is. And of course, very critical for me is the team: how it’s organized, what’s the background of the founders, and how they work together.

You say that teams are really important. How much does a founder’s personality or reputation factor into how you perceive the investment risk?

In my experience founding an Internet company, I learned that you definitely have to have a person who understands technology: it’s very critical that one of the founders understands how to build robots and how the technology works. But I find that the best combination is to have two people: one who is more technical, and another who is more of a strategic marketing, sales and product kind of person.

It’s rare to find these two kinds of skills in one person. A lot of the time, when technology people start companies, they’re very excited about the technology but they pretty much don’t know what to do with it. They say, ‘We have some super cool technology,’ but when you ask, ‘How do you want to build your business? What’s your plan?’ they don’t know the answer. Unfortunately this problem is very common.

If people are missing some of these skills, do you see it as your role to provide some aspect of that in terms of mentorship? Or do you expect the companies that you invest in to already have those skills in place?

I try to find the companies that already have those skills in place, or that at least have the potential to go there, because I think these skills are critical. If within the company you don’t already have product DNA or a good understanding of the customer, for example, it’s very difficult to create this culture from the outside.

I can definitely help with experience and help explain the market, but I don’t want to be the leading guy. I don’t want to tell people what to do. I’m available to entrepreneurs to answer their questions and give some advice, but it should be their decision in the end. It’s only the way you can build a good company. I think that if an investor starts to manage the company, it’s just a road to nowhere.

So essentially what you’re saying is that, even if the market is perhaps more risky, you might be willing to invest in a company as long as the right team is in place, if they’ve got all the skill sets, and the right product to solve a problem. Is that correct?     

Yes, but it’s also important that I personally believe in this market. For example, in the early days of the Internet, nobody understood exactly how it worked, or what businesses there would be around it, but there was a group of people who really believed that the Internet would one day be a big business and make a big impact.

The same is for me. I really believe in robotics in general, and particularly in several markets inside of robotics. Of course there are still lots of questions in terms of how exactly it will work, and what kinds of business models will be successful, but I definitely think the robotics market will be very big – and what’s more interesting – that it will solve a lot of problems for human beings.

What are the robotics markets that you really believe in right now?

I really do believe in telepresence, but of course this market is in a very early stage, and the companies involved here need to prove that they can find the right products and the right audience for these products. 

Would you say that some markets in robotics are more risky than others at the moment?

Yes absolutely. There are definitely already some more established markets, like vacuum cleaners, for example … the market is already there and everybody understands that you can sell a vacuum cleaner to a customer. But of course you already have players there: iRobot, Samsung and LG entering this market, and a lot of Chinese companies as well.

On the other side, you have something like telepresence. We know that police and military organizations are already buying a lot of this, so it’s wanted, there’s a market. But it’s less predictable in the consumer market because it’s at such an early stage.

You tend to invest in more mature consumer robotics and not so much in moonshots. Is this because there’s a lack of well-considered moonshot proposals out there to choose from, or are you just not interested in those kinds of projects?

First of all, I think mature is not the right word for the companies that I’m investing in. I think of mature as a public company that has a big valuation. If you ask me whether I’m going to invest in a very early stage, the answer is no. I want to invest in a company that already has some kind of prototype … If you want to try to start something, you really need to invest at least a small amount of money yourself, or have some kind of support from your friends or family, or from a source like Kickstarter … because if a team is successful at building some kind of prototype and is able to get some sales from it, it’s a sign that the team has the experience to take a concept to a first project, and this is an important criteria for me.

Can you tell us about any particular robotics technologies that you would classify as being especially visionary or innovative? 

I think there are two kinds of innovation: one where you create something absolutely unusual, and another where a product already exists but you figure out how to bring it to the level where millions of people can use it. An example of this second kind of innovation is the iPhone: touch screens existed before, smart phones existed before, but Apple created a product that millions of people started to use, and this kind of innovation is no less important than the innovation of inventing something new.

But if you’re asking about absolutely new directions that have very high risk and yet are potentially very promising, I see the space market as one very interesting area. Satellites, for example, are getting very cheap to make and though they are very high risk, I find them very promising. I also think that anything related to robotic cars is a very interesting market for investing, and yet very high risk because there still needs to be significant innovation to bring these technologies to the market. Drones can also be in this category.

Is resistance to adopt these technologies on the part of the consumers a part of what makes them risky?

I think there’s a lot of resistance, and infrastructure and people’s minds change slowly at first. But once some level of change has been achieved, adaptation happens very quickly. If you look at the first cars or railroads, we initially saw very slow adaptation, but then the adaptation accelerated.

My belief is that robotic cars will repeat pretty much the same route as hybrid cars, where we spent ten years using electric and gas cars together before there was some kind of visible market share. And this is not just an example, it’s a model we should be using: anytime we are thinking about a robotic product that involves a lot of people and infrastructure, we should be thinking about hybrid models. Mercedes Benz, for example, introduced a car that can park itself, but you still need a person to drive the car. I think the two technologies – self-driving cars and cars driven by people – will live together for quite some period of time, maybe ten or twenty years before they merge together.

In the Robots Podcast interview from last November you said that a lot of people have good ideas, but the time isn’t always right for investment. Is there a right time to invest in higher risk initiatives? Is now a good time?

Definitely right now is the right time for the robotics market in general, and I really believe that the biggest innovations will be done first by startups. With robotics, it’s not just software, it’s also hardware, and ten or twenty years ago it was almost impossible for a small startup company in robotics to get going because it was too expensive. But now electronic components for robots are really cheap, and 3D printers help a lot with prototypes … so you can have a team of three to five engineers working on a product, and then they can change it based on feedback from users in a test market. The whole process of product development is accelerated significantly.

Do you have a message for young entrepreneurs and students out there who are getting ready to enter the robotics market?  

Right now you have an opportunity that didn’t exist ten or twenty years ago. Right now you can start a robotics company, and the market you create will be able to change people’s lives.

I want you to think about this: if you have a good idea and a good team, come to us and we’ll try to help. Just focus on what kind of problem you are solving – not the technology – and think about your team very deeply, because the people with whom you co-found will be very important for your future success.

NanoSatisfi, a Silicon Valley based cubesat startup, today received $300,000 investment from Grishin Robotics bringing their total seed funding to $1,750,000, not including their initial successful Kickstarter campaign of $106,330 and CEO Peter Platzer’s personal investment. NanoSatisfi aim to provide affordable space satellite access to everyone through their autonomous cubesats. The first launch dates have been booked for summer and fall 2013.

NanoSatisfi’s founder and CEO Peter Platzer intends to bring Moore’s Law to space. The first NanoSatisfi cubesat will have approximately 1000x more computational power than the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Due to the expense and length of time to successfully launch something, spacecraft have lagged far behind the rate of change on earth. We landed men on the moon with slide rules and computers that don’t hold a candle to any smartphone today.

Platzer plans to leverage Moore’s Law to get many small satellites launched and unlock a wide range of citizen science and crowd sourced uses. It costs $350,000 to build, launch and operate one satellite which is expected to generate $750,000 revenue. Grishin’s investment will extend the number of satellite launches in NanoSatisfi’s near future. By utilizing the most widely adopted satellite standard, NanoSatisfi does not need a dedicated launch for their 10cm x 10cm x 30cm satellites. Platzer has developed a “profitable de-risking and scaling strategy to target the 25bn+ enterprise space data market”.

Each satellite is a cube weighing about 1 kilogram, equipped with cameras, a Geiger counter, a spectrometer, a magnetometer, and an evolving array of sensors. As described in TechCrunch, “ArduSats are designed to be active for about two years, at which point they’re replaced by new ones incorporating the latest technology. For example, even though the second ArduSat is launching only a few months after the first, its camera will actually be more powerful, thanks to rapidly dropping price.” [Anthony Ha]

The US Whitehouse has recently honored Platzer as a US Champion of Change for his vision for the future. Platzer had always been interested in space exploration but was impatient with the state of the industry. Although he trained as a high-energy physicist, Platzer spent most of his career on Wall Street in finance. This turns out to be a good combination for creating a strategic approach to space robots.

Silicon Valley is starting to recognize that hardware and robotics startups may be the next big thing. NanoSatisfi has been incubated at Lemnos Labs, who aim to bring the ‘silicon back to the Valley’, and have successfully incubated several other robot startups. And yes,   these are space robots, operating autonomously.

NanoSatisfi’s first satellite is currently being readied for launch in Japan, with JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency. NanoSatisfi are offering control of their cubesat for as little as $250 a week, opening the doors to all sorts of experimentation and big amounts of data. They’ve opened the Ardusat Control Center for Kickstarter backers, who can now start writing code for the ArduSat without needing to download the Arduino IDE. Backers will be able to code straight from the web to the testing infrastructure and then to download their data after completing their experiments on the ArduSat.

Already, 5 students from Finland have done a ‘space camp’, learning everything from orbital mechanics to space law. Each student successfully completed Arduino experiments that ranged from using a vacuum chamber to test and ultrasonic distance sensor under extreme temperature variations, to using a luminosity sensor to detect and measure the length of lightening strikes. What else could we do with a spacebird’s eye view of the world?

I interviewed Elad Inbar, CEO of the RobotAppStore, just before the announcement that Grishin Robotics was investing $250,000 in this cloud robotics market play.

For Grishin Robotics, the future is in the clouds. Grishin Robotics are investing $250,000 into RobotAppStore, an online marketplace for robotics applications. It seems that Grishin is betting on the robotics industry following the same patterns as the smartphone or personal computing industry. But can robotics be compared to either personal computing or smartphones, given the lack of a unified robotic platform or even a common robotic function?

Elad Inbar, the founder of RobotAppStore believes that we are seeing the same sort of convergence in robotics as happened in the mobile phone industry. In the early days of the phone industry, developers used to have to build a different ring tone for every single model of phone, even phones from the same company. This convergence in robotics owes a lot to the development of ROS and the increasing use of COTS or common technologies.

RobotAppStore and Grishin Robotics also have infographics on robot apps and cloud robotics.

Read more from our Startup Series.

For Grishin Robotics, the future is in the clouds.

Grishin Robotics are investing $250,000 into RobotAppStore, an online marketplace for robotics applications. It seems that Grishin is betting on the robotics industry following the same patterns as the smartphone or personal computing industry. But can robotics be compared to either personal computing or smartphones, given the lack of a unified robotic platform or even a common robotic function?

Elad Inbar, the founder of RobotAppStore believes that we are seeing the same sort of convergence in robotics as happened in the mobile phone industry. In the early days of the phone industry, developers used to have to build a different ring tone for every single model of phone, even phones from the same company. This convergence in robotics owes a lot to the development of ROS and the increasing use of COTS or common technologies.

Since opening in 2011 in San Francisco, Elad and RobotAppStore have built up an inventory of hundreds of apps for dozens of different robots, from the Roomba vacuum cleaners, to Spheros, AR Drone quadcopters and humanoids like the Aldebaran Nao robots. The apps range from the entertaining, like a Roomba delivering a birthday cake and singing “Happy Birthday”, to the eminently practical, like an app giving an early overheating warning for the Nao.

The market feedback is that consumers who purchase one robot app, go on to purchase all the available apps for their robot. Inbar also finds that many people who contact the RobotAppStore don’t have a robot yet, but see the AppStore as a gateway to learning more about robots, so he’s launched Robopedia, a ‘wikipedia for robots’. Another way that Inbar is building the ecosystem of cloud robotics is by providing support for robot app developers, creating documentation to help developers make a career out of writing software for robots.

The personal robotics market is a rapidly growing industry – estimated by ABI research to hit the $18 billion mark in 2015. According to RobotAppStore estimates, based on figures provided by UNECE, IFR, ABI Research and BCC Research, more than 30 million programmable robots have been sold to date.

“Robotics is a combination of good hardware and software – thus, the important role of a project like the RobotAppStore in the market ecosystem is unquestionable. The concept of ‘Cloud robotics’, which implies ability of all robots to connect to the internet, share a common knowledge database and seamlessly upgrade their functions in real-time, is a soon-to-be future; one reminiscent of the of personal computer industry. We believe that the strong team behind RobotAppStore coupled with their ability to leverage the advantages of having strong community already built around the product, can make this future closer”, said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics, Co-Founder & CEO of Mail.Ru Group.

“The support provided by Grishin Robotics is a great vote of confidence in our plans for the company,” said Elad Inbar, Founder & CEO of RobotAppStore. “It shows their belief in our vision and the importance of the marketplace for robotics applications. The robotics industry has reached its tipping-point with broad market acceptance, usability of robots, and the ability to extend the robots’ capabilities. Being a part of Grishin Robotics’ portfolio provides high synergy with other robotics companies and better resource utilization. We are excited to use this funding to secure our place as THE market-leader of the consumer and educational robot-apps industry. I would like to thank our community of developers, and invite awesome and creative developers to join us!”

I interviewed Elad Inbar, founder of RobotAp Store, for the Robot Startup Series, where he speaks in more depth about Grishin’s investment in RobotAppStore and the synergy of their vision of cloud robotics.

For Grishin Robotics, the future is in the clouds.

Grishin Robotics are investing $250,000 into RobotAppStore, an online marketplace for robotics applications. It seems that Grishin is betting on the robotics industry following the same patterns as the smartphone or personal computing industry. But can robotics be compared to either personal computing or smartphones, given the lack of a unified robotic platform or even a common robotic function?

Elad Inbar, the founder of RobotAppStore believes that we are seeing the same sort of convergence in robotics as happened in the mobile phone industry. In the early days of the phone industry, developers used to have to build a different ring tone for every single model of phone, even phones from the same company. This convergence in robotics owes a lot to the development of ROS and the increasing use of COTS or common technologies.

Since opening in 2011 in San Francisco, Elad and RobotAppStore have built up an inventory of hundreds of apps for dozens of different robots, from the Roomba vacuum cleaners, to Spheros, AR Drone quadcopters and humanoids like the Aldebaran Nao robots. The apps range from the entertaining, like a Roomba delivering a birthday cake and singing “Happy Birthday”, to the eminently practical, like an app giving an early overheating warning for the Nao.

The market feedback is that consumers who purchase one robot app, go on to purchase all the available apps for their robot. Inbar also finds that many people who contact the RobotAppStore don’t have a robot yet, but see the AppStore as a gateway to learning more about robots, so he’s launched Robopedia, a ‘wikipedia for robots’. Another way that Inbar is building the ecosystem of cloud robotics is by providing support for robot app developers, creating documentation to help developers make a career out of writing software for robots.

The personal robotics market is a rapidly growing industry – estimated by ABI research to hit the $18 billion mark in 2015. According to RobotAppStore estimates, based on figures provided by UNECE, IFR, ABI Research and BCC Research, more than 30 million programmable robots have been sold to date.

“Robotics is a combination of good hardware and software – thus, the important role of a project like the RobotAppStore in the market ecosystem is unquestionable. The concept of ‘Cloud robotics’, which implies ability of all robots to connect to the internet, share a common knowledge database and seamlessly upgrade their functions in real-time, is a soon-to-be future; one reminiscent of the of personal computer industry. We believe that the strong team behind RobotAppStore coupled with their ability to leverage the advantages of having strong community already built around the product, can make this future closer”, said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics, Co-Founder & CEO of Mail.Ru Group.

“The support provided by Grishin Robotics is a great vote of confidence in our plans for the company,” said Elad Inbar, Founder & CEO of RobotAppStore. “It shows their belief in our vision and the importance of the marketplace for robotics applications. The robotics industry has reached its tipping-point with broad market acceptance, usability of robots, and the ability to extend the robots’ capabilities. Being a part of Grishin Robotics’ portfolio provides high synergy with other robotics companies and better resource utilization. We are excited to use this funding to secure our place as THE market-leader of the consumer and educational robot-apps industry. I would like to thank our community of developers, and invite awesome and creative developers to join us!”

I interviewed Elad Inbar, founder of RobotAp Store, for the Robot Startup Series, where he speaks in more depth about Grishin’s investment in RobotAppStore and the synergy of their vision of cloud robotics.