Tech In Action / Proof of Technology. Evidence over hype. See what already pays today. AI • Robotics • Automation • Business
USA
Joined January 2024
- Tweets264
- Following587
- Followers451
- Likes1.6K
Self-driving truck maker booked $3.5M, and the IKEA truck isn't driverless yet.
Kodiak AI booked $3.5 million in the second quarter, per its 10-Q. The driverless part of that business is 35 trucks hauling frac sand in the Permian Basin for Atlas Energy, with nobody in the cab.
The IKEA run that went around this month is still a plan. Driverless runs on I-45 between Dallas and Houston, before the year is out.
On public highways the company still rides with people aboard, and CNET's ride-along in California has a safety driver named Greg behind the wheel, hands ready. In the sand, Atlas owns the trucks and Kodiak supplies the self-driving software. Somebody's getting paid today, and it's the sand fleet.
The price isn't public, so count it per unit, revenue over trucks. The filing doesn't name customers, and its largest one is 56 percent of the quarter. If that's Atlas, call it $56K a truck per quarter, my math from its 10-Q.
If it isn't, the trucks earn less. Aurora, the rival already running driverless on I-45, has a year-end target from its CFO that works out to about $100K a truck per quarter, by my math. $56K in the sand, $100K on the interstate, and only one of those is booked.
If you run a fleet, the first paying lane looks like this one. A single customer, the same route and the same sand every day.
My bet for the next year: the money keeps coming from sand, and the IKEA truck keeps hauling a story.
Stand outside a San Antonio TV station, ask for an airport ride, and the car with no driver quotes $24.
Uber quoted about the same, and Lyft about $21, in a side-by-side fare test filmed for local TV. The robot then took 31 minutes to the airport. A human driver usually does it in about 15.
Waymo opened San Antonio to anyone with the app on Oct. 14, airport trips included, no waitlist. KSAT 12 ran the test the next morning, and the car picked them up at the corner instead of where they stood.
They sell it per trip, priced right next to Uber, with nobody behind the wheel to split the fare with. My math, from the quotes in that test: the Uber gets you there in about half the time for the same $24. The robot is charging full price plus 16 minutes.
The fare already matches the human. The clock doesn't, because the route went through side streets instead of the highway, and that's most likely where the extra minutes went.
On this one ride, the only thing the human driver still sold was those 16 minutes, and that edge lasts until Waymo puts its cars on the highway.
Flying out of SAT with an hour to spare? That's the one trip where the slow robot costs you the same as the Uber, so take it once and time it yourself.
$2.1 million to keep lonely New Yorkers talking to a robot.
New York's aging office renewed its ElliQ deal with Intuition Robotics for three more years, reported at $2.1 million in a trade-press write-up. ElliQ is a tabletop robot with a glowing head and a tablet that starts the conversation itself, from pill reminders to asking about your day.
ElliQ sells per unit, and here the unit buyer is the state, not the family. Retail is $49 a month on the annual plan plus a $249 setup fee, so a family pays $837 in year one. New York pays in bulk, and eligible seniors get the robot free.
No unit count was published. In 2023 the state had bought 900 ElliQs, per AP, and if the fleet stays near that size, $2.1 million over three years comes to about $778 per robot a year.
That's my estimate, since no unit price was disclosed. A family renewing on the annual plan pays $588, so the state may not be getting a bulk discount at all.
The state also hands Intuition the one thing a startup can't buy cheaply, a list of people already screened as lonely. On CBS, the agency's director says the units go only to those screened seniors. If you sell anything to seniors, the buyer to study is the aging office, and Washington state has let Medicaid pay for ElliQ since March.
My bet for the next three years: senior tech gets won by whoever learns to bill an agency, and the grandkid with a credit card becomes the side channel.
You let go of a weather balloon and it pops after one trip. Reusable ones just got an Air Force order worth $1.7 million.
They come from WindBorne, a California startup whose balloons vent gas to sink and drop ballast to rise. That lets one balloon keep riding the wind over oceans, where the old kind is rarely launched.
The $1.7 million is what's been ordered in the Air Force contract so far. The ceiling is up to $49 million, so the other $47.3 million is room to order, not money paid.
The Air Force pays for data as raw material, the way a bakery pays for flour. It orders readings for one region and one time window when an operation needs them, and WindBorne keeps the fleet.
The deal skipped competitive bidding. WindBorne's CTO told TechCrunch the company was the only one able to provide global data the way the Air Force needed it. Somebody's getting paid here for being the only option, and the balloons are just how WindBorne got there.
If you can collect readings where nobody else reaches, from open ocean to a remote ridge, the gap you cover is the product. Find the buyer who has no other option before you price anything.
LiveTechProof retweeted
Who keeps paying for a 911 drone once the grant runs out?
Bellingham, Washington just got a state grant of nearly half a million dollars to put Skydio drones on 911 calls. A drone launches from one of three docks around the city, and a police pilot flies it remotely, aiming to be over the scene in two minutes or less.
The bill that matters comes after the grant. Oceanside, California approved its five-year drone contract in September, and after year one the city estimates about $145,833 a year for software, upkeep and replacement hardware.
Its drones answered about 1,300 calls in a 13-month pilot. My math puts that near $120 a call. The bill is fixed, so the city is really buying calls per task, and every extra flight makes each one cheaper.
Bellingham's log since August is almost all training flights. Its single real call was helping the city's public works crew. Nobody can price a call off a log like that yet.
The grant covers Bellingham through 2028, and the city's agenda bill doesn't say who pays after that.
Both cities fly the drones with their own police staff, so the money leaving city hall goes to the companies that sell and service the docks. If you run a drone service shop, cost per call is the one number a council will compare you on.
Oceanside expects to pay about $145,833 a year for drones that fly. Bellingham's half million has, so far, flown one real call.
Who keeps paying for a 911 drone once the grant runs out?
Bellingham, Washington just got a state grant of nearly half a million dollars to put Skydio drones on 911 calls. A drone launches from one of three docks around the city, and a police pilot flies it remotely, aiming to be over the scene in two minutes or less.
The bill that matters comes after the grant. Oceanside, California approved its five-year drone contract in September, and after year one the city estimates about $145,833 a year for software, upkeep and replacement hardware.
Its drones answered about 1,300 calls in a 13-month pilot. My math puts that near $120 a call. The bill is fixed, so the city is really buying calls per task, and every extra flight makes each one cheaper.
Bellingham's log since August is almost all training flights. Its single real call was helping the city's public works crew. Nobody can price a call off a log like that yet.
The grant covers Bellingham through 2028, and the city's agenda bill doesn't say who pays after that.
Both cities fly the drones with their own police staff, so the money leaving city hall goes to the companies that sell and service the docks. If you run a drone service shop, cost per call is the one number a council will compare you on.
Oceanside expects to pay about $145,833 a year for drones that fly. Bellingham's half million has, so far, flown one real call.
LiveTechProof retweeted
Call Denver 311 next year and a bot may answer first, at a year-one minute rate near $0.55.
That's $550,000 a year for a million minutes of calls, in a contract amendment the Denver council takes up on October 13, and the price climbs a little each year after. The bot says it's a bot, answers from city pages, and hands you to a person the moment you say "human."
Now open a voice-AI price list. Retell AI, which sells the raw parts, prices a sample voice agent at about 11 cents a minute on its public pricing page, and a phone line adds a cent and a half. Call it 13 cents all in, by my math.
The gap between 13 and 55 cents is the business. As I read it, the money buys work more than AI, loading a city's answers and wiring each hand-off to the right department, under a contract that runs to 2031. The vendor is Citibot, 9News reported the pricing, and the full council still has to vote.
The same deal fits a one-person shop, priced per task, where one task is one minute on the phone. Set up an AI line for a plumber who misses every call after 5 p.m., and he pays you per minute while the platform keeps its 13 cents.
It holds only while the bot actually closes calls. Every caller who ends up yelling "human" likely burns billed minutes that fixed nothing, and that's the number to track first.
Get one plumber's missed calls answered and booked, and you can show him what the extra 42 cents bought, which is the same pitch a city vendor is making in Denver.
Call Denver 311 next year and a bot may answer first, at a year-one minute rate near $0.55.
That's $550,000 a year for a million minutes of calls, in a contract amendment the Denver council takes up on October 13, and the price climbs a little each year after. The bot says it's a bot, answers from city pages, and hands you to a person the moment you say "human."
Now open a voice-AI price list. Retell AI, which sells the raw parts, prices a sample voice agent at about 11 cents a minute on its public pricing page, and a phone line adds a cent and a half. Call it 13 cents all in, by my math.
The gap between 13 and 55 cents is the business. As I read it, the money buys work more than AI, loading a city's answers and wiring each hand-off to the right department, under a contract that runs to 2031. The vendor is Citibot, 9News reported the pricing, and the full council still has to vote.
The same deal fits a one-person shop, priced per task, where one task is one minute on the phone. Set up an AI line for a plumber who misses every call after 5 p.m., and he pays you per minute while the platform keeps its 13 cents.
It holds only while the bot actually closes calls. Every caller who ends up yelling "human" likely burns billed minutes that fixed nothing, and that's the number to track first.
Get one plumber's missed calls answered and booked, and you can show him what the extra 42 cents bought, which is the same pitch a city vendor is making in Denver.
LiveTechProof retweeted
$21,983,139.93 for ten years of Axon gear in one Florida police department.
That's what Lakeland has committed to pay Axon, the Taser company, per the city commission memo. The bundle pairs body cameras with an AI that drafts the officer's report.
Year one is already $124,547.01 short. The city covers that gap by cutting overtime spending, so officers' extra hours pay for part of the start.
Grants pay a big share. A state grant pays toward years one and two, and a federal stipend has already landed. A second federal grant, for years three to five, is still pending, and grants pass half the ten-year bill only if it comes through.
Call it about $79,000 per unit over ten years, if the unit is one of the roughly 278 officers the Lakeland Gazette counted. Somebody's getting paid, and it's a lot per badge. The commission passed it unanimously on October 5.
What breaks first is that pending grant. If it doesn't come, the city either finds the money or uses the contract's exit for unfunded years.
If you run a department, this is the deal shape vendors will bring you next: priced as one bundle over a decade, with grants doing the early lifting.
Watch year three. If that grant lands, expect neighboring cities to sign the same bundle within a year.