A trio of former Dell EMC engineers are building a fleet of rentable robots to help companies crank out monotonous tasks amid a lingering labor shortage.
Aivot is a Seattle-based startup that sells an AI-powered humanoid android to mid-sized businesses to help out with tasks like labeling, moving and cleaning.
Evergreens, a fast casual salad chain with 18 locations across the Pacific Northwest, uses Aivot to help apply labels on bottles for a new beverage line. It was a job that Evergreens previously struggled to fill.
Aivot CEO Shashwat Srivastav founded the startup after working as vice president of engineering at Dell EMC, and as principal development lead at Microsoft Azure. He’s joined by Chief Technology Officer Sriram Sankaran, a former group engineering manager at Amazon and senior director of engineering at Dell EMC, and Founding Engineer Igor Medvedev, a former software developer at Dell EMC.
The startup has bootstrapped since founding in 2017 and works with a handful of pilot customers. The robots were deployed at Seattle-based restaurant Marjorie to package to-go meals in boxes and bowls. They can also be used in warehouses, online fulfillment centers and retail stores.
Evergreens President Tom Small called Aivot the “perfect solution” as it streamlines automated tasks — “things that people just don’t enjoy doing very much.” It allows the company to spend more time training employees and moving them to more skilled positions.
Aivot’s robots can “understand the context of the physical world and the rules of acting within it,” Srivastav said. Recent advancements in deep learning and AI are helping the devices operate in unstructured environments and handle open-ended tasks, he said.
It takes about two months to build the hardware for one Aivot robot unit, but just an hour for the robot to get trained on a new environment. Once acclimated, the robots leverage their pre-existing skills — scooping, pouring and object placement — to accomplish a task. Users designate work through Aivot’s companion app.
Adding new actions to the robot’s skillset requires about two days of development work, Srivastav said.
Aivot rents its robots to customers and charges a monthly subscription fee. It has three tiers of prices based on hourly usage: 40 hours ($1,600), 60 hours ($2,200) and 80 hours ($2,600). Robot deployment is currently the company’s only source of revenue, Srivastav said.
There is growing demand for automation after the pandemic pushed employees out of the workforce in droves. The food robotics market is expected to reach $4 billion by 2028, growing at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 11%, according to market research.
Other robotic food and beverage startups in Seattle include Artly, which creates robotic baristas, and Picnic, which sells a pizza-making robot and last year partnered with Dominos.
