Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation
techfundingnews.com
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First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
And the German has universal healthcare, clocks out at 5 and can’t be bothered, and gets real vacation time.
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/automation-engineer/
I interact with a lot of engineers moving from Europe and US and it’s never how US politics portray it. German friends talk about paying for private insurance because the public one is so bad.
So yes, Americans love consuming healthcare. Is there any category they aren’t a high consumer of? You can’t measure efficiency only looking at the input side.
As a consequence, insurance companies generally try to sign up mixed-pool, younger, healthier (read: employee plans) over older, sicker, opt-in insurance (read: ACA).
There are ways they can and can't legally do that, but it's always the goal. In the same way that retail order flow is targeted by HFTs.
Urgent care clinics have been big in our region. The primary system is obviously overloaded, and 2 of these have popped up in the last 3 years. It's more expensive per visit than our primary physician, but cheaper than an ER visit, which could easily take half a day anyways.
I don’t have metrics for good/bad. I’m just going off of them telling me it’s bad.
The US government funds most of the resident slots through which the path to become a doctor runs.
The AMA generally (but not always) lobbies against increasing slots too much, reasoning it would decrease the premium doctors (its members) could charge.
As a result, most of the time the US has too low of a supply of doctors, especially in general, highly-demanded areas (family medicine, internal medicine, psychiatry).
That is a misguided simplification. Please correct this, before anyone starts to believe it for real.
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.
But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.
What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?
[0] First Google result: https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...
Edit: I was curious what the answer might be and couldn't find much. One source calculates the tax burden to be about 53% of income.
The link you provided is the web page of the interest group I mentioned. They will literally try any trick in the book to get that number up, including adding a bunch of things that aren't even taxes, a boatload of things they call "quasi-taxes" with numbers presumably pulled from their ass, and adding expenses your employer incurs only to subtract them again immediately. Anything to get that percentage number up.
But even they don't even call the resulting number "tax burden" - that'd be transparently stupid. They more generally call it a "burden ratio" (Belastungsquote).
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous their calculations are: If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf). Does this still sound like something you can easily compare one country to the next and draw useful conclusions from? Of course not. In the next country it might come from an interest group with a different goal, a government calculation, or a Fox News writer.
> You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
What you're trying to get at - hopefully because the alternative is a nonsense number with no purpose other than being a fun fact supporting a discussion about degrees of individual autonomy in modern societies - is called discretionary income, and it's only meaningful when adjusted for cost of living and compared across similar living situations.
Aren't you talking about social contributions that your employer is forced by law to pay on your behalf? You realize that if this was not in place, those money would go directly to you since your salary is whole sum your employer is paying towards your employment? Doesn't seem you grok it fully from your words.
I am not claiming if its good or bad (dramatic global financial changes will test viability of all these systems rather well in upcoming years, I'd expect many people will be unhappy when their naive views hit reality of numbers). I am outside of such system, in mostly private social system in Switzerland (aka I save for myself, mostly) and wouldn't want it any other way.
In any case, the resulting individual "burden" is meaningless if you don't also quantify individual benefit. As an extreme example, imagine a country in which your income taxes pay for things such as transportation credits usable on gas, public transport and roads, while the neighboring country has mostly private toll roads and low taxes. Another example is health insurance. In Germany it is pretty nearly mandatory with most having some form of insurance, and total spending per citizen is around $9,000. In the US more than 90% are insured and spending is higher, but within the same ballpark.
What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison? Fuck all. It's at best usable as a prompt for a philosophical discussion about autonomy, but often merely used for masturbation or making dishonest arguments designed to go over well in establishments specializing in alcoholic beverages - like those of a certain interest group.
Obviously yes, and obviously no. Just as we don't add the price of groceries or rent to wages unless the employer subsidizes those in which case obviously yes we must.
> What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison?
It tells you how expensive it is to live there, relatively speaking. Obviously (as you note) that's only half of the discussion just as an expensive appliance might or might not be worth the premium to any particular individual. But you're wrong to dismiss it out of hand as you do. Just as it's disingenuous to dismiss the benefits of (for example) universal healthcare it is also disingenuous to attempt to derail discussion that focuses directly on total cost or effective tax burden or what have you.
What you are dismissing as a "nonsense number" of an "interest group" I would consider one of the most accurate and easily understood quantifications of total cost.
It's meaningless to say "Germans pay X, Americans pay Y" if the two receive completely different benefits in exchange for those rates.
Furthermore, the point that the German system would be paying to individuals if not to the government is somewhat disingenuous. There are a few options.
1. The government doesn't do it, so private options do at some cost
2. There's some government-private hybrid
3. It's not done at all
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with parental leave as an example. I completely agree with what you wrote but don't see it being at odds with anything said previously.
I think we all know that Germans enjoy substantially more free at point of service public services than those in the US let alone those living in a developing country. Obviously that costs something. Yet when someone brings up the price tag you get a bunch of partisan screeching about how prices are meaningless.
Prices _aren't_ meaningless. The US military (for example) is absurdly expensive. There are lots of things received as a result of that expenditure. Regardless, the relative cost is high and that's not meaningless to point out given that everyone involved in the discussion has at least some conception that there are important differences in the downstream impact.
Nobody said its going to be trivial to calculate, reality doesn't care about that.
So, “half goes away in taxes” is an exaggeration, but I can totally sympathize with the feeling. Especially since the quality of healthcare is declining and the pay-as-you-go pension system is only built to benefit the current generation of pensioners.
* note that, if one is earning less than 77'000€ today or less than 84'150€ in 2027, one is prohibited to switch to a private insurance. One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
I anyway doubt that the wages would be at the same standard if there wouldn't be any deductions (from the beginning). Wages in expensive cities are higher because the cost of living must be matched. Similarly salary negotiations account for deductions. Nobody wants a job that doesn't pay the bills.
"visible" and "invisble" Brutto. The one is without "contributions from employer", which is a lie anyway since an employer makes a total comp perspective and he for sure includes his "contribution" into that
For a $110k salary the federal employer paid payroll taxes would be almost $8,500, or ~7.69%. They would also pay some amount to unemployment insurance, but that rate depends a lot state by state.
I realize that's less than the Euro taxes, just wanted to share so everyone is aware of these often forgotten US taxes when compared.
I do agree though, such a thing should also be considered when thinking about total cost of the compensation. Things definitely start getting a bit fuzzier though. You then also get stuff like HSA matching, 401k matching, etc.
Health insurance yes, retirement… no, not really. They may offer a 401k plan and some might even offer a match, but most companies offer at most a 4% salary match (dollar for dollar, or sometimes 50c per dollar).
So, it’s a vehicle to invest retirement funds with some tax advantages, but it’s not really “providing” it like you would subsidized healthcare.
I don't know how bad it is in Denmark, but keep in mind that journalism that is not subject to profit seeking and independent on whatever billionaire owns the outlet, is not only valuable because you personally consume it, but also because it shapes the public discourse and thus indirectly may have influence on political decisions.
The German public broadcasters, especially the Tagesschau, are the worst. Also this is a really good video that explains how crazily the public broadcasters are creating the propaganda in a subtle manner to push their own agenda rather than being neutral. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46MP_G8CKFA)
one criticism i didn't get towards the end is that one particular politician would always give the same response to the same question. that confused me because why wouldn't she? why is that poor? doesn't make any sense to me. but that's unrelated to the criticism of the TV reporting.
If you mean the existence of two-tier private/public insurance, yes. The two-tier system was abolished in most of Europe for good reason. Either they abolished substitutive private insurance, restricted it, or transformed private insurers into regulated providers of universal basic coverage, e.g. very recently in the Netherlands.
I think it is important to be (at least a bit) precise in this debate.
I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc. Discussion about the cost efficiency and fairness of the system are warranted, of course. Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
Since you are accounting all those taxes, including the VAT on the citizen's side, companies only pay the Arbeitgeberanteil (you didn't mention) and the taxes on profit?
Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.
Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?
The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
I can also tell you working in tech for a very long time, if you aren’t working for a Silicon Valley company you might have health insurance options, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good. Especially if you have a preexisting condition.
What does this mean?
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
https://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/about-the-aca/pre-existing-co...
> Health insurance companies cannot refuse coverage or charge you more just because you have a “pre-existing condition” — that is, a health problem you had before the date that new health coverage starts.
>Health insurers can no longer charge more or deny coverage to you or your child because of a pre-existing health condition like asthma, diabetes, or cancer, as well as pregnancy.
>They cannot limit benefits for that condition either. Once you have insurance, they can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition.
This has been in effect since 2014 due to the Affordable Care Act.
I'd love to hear about people working in 'tech' who don't have decent health insurance options. If that's you, where do you work and what do you do?
> preexisting condition
Not with ACA compliant plans
This is not acceptable. Healthcare should be a basic right, and a lot of European countries treat it as such (e.g. in Germany, everyone is insured, no matter their employment status, and its mandatory and equal for everyone regardless of their job).
People also can't be fired for being sick.
The whole thing is a scam run by our politicians, who of course are all private insured.
outside germany the `,` reads as thousands-separator. may I offer you a `.` in exchange?
also that's gross, not net (Brutto/Netto) which is _painfully_ lower.
I am surprised that this suddenly is a “based on what data?” discussion.
It has always been an apples / oranges comparison.
If it's true it should be trivial to provide said evidence.
1. These averages are an average. Rarely are they paid. I don't know where these numbers are from but the these numbers are for top earners in good paying industries.
There are junior, normal and senior devs, sometimes above is a lead dev. Business maybe has 2-3 leads that govern a head count of dozens, and many working off-shore.
It is called blended average. People who rank in 107k are paid including bonuses. And rarely make any further wage jumps. The dev who is paid 200k fixed in Germany is a myth, not even close to 120k.
Germany hates IT and devs. Business comes first, and anything and everything regarding IT is considered a cost factor, a necessary burden.
2. Freelancers
Freelancers rake in more money due to tax deductions. So a day rate of 800-1000EUR per month is a pay off and freelancers have to take care of the taxes etc.
Companies on the other hand can deduct those "investments" and roughly pay half the price in the end. So, this is the problem with employment: you are a cost factor and you are a liability from the beginning due to worker rights etc.
Germany punishes workers as well as freelancers. But I could not raise payment as I saw fit. Germany means yearly total times 1,25 = total cost for a company ("employers' part of the tax" as sugar coating for taxes above 60%).
100 workers with a yearly raise of 2-5% in payments amount exponentially and are a risk factor especially considering the fact that productivity rarely increases as well as value to the company on average. So ever increased payments over a span of 10-20 years.
That is the problem with the system: socialism favors keeping you poor. Don't steal people and companies their hard earned money, lower taxes, allow for higher payments at will not by "number comparison and increase to all" and let companies workers decide where they spend their bucks.
3. Conclusion You might wonder how much the guys really perceive on their bank account in the end. It may be lower than you think. Rule of fist: if you do not immediately make the switch to stay in the US you have lots of cuts along the way: company share, taxes.
Before I went to Senior Management I was totally on your page. Now knowing both sides I see the matrix so to say. I am still on your side however business doesn't benefit from all the taxes.
Until now - the freelancer thingy is heavy under fire ("Scheinselbständigkeit") and its quite to difficult to have only one or two clients; also 1-person-GmbHs are heavy under fire from the public pension scheme.
I think a more pressing question is why businesses all over, but especially in America, are so obsessed with cost-cutting to the exclusion of everything else that they're openly, predictably setting up said business to implode once the wrong people leave.
Like I dunno, being a pink-haired lesbian communist I am, I'm somewhat suspect of my own opinions, but that said, I personally have no problem seeing that investing in your employees is probably a good idea if you want your business to remain sustainable for the long-haul. But nowadays all corporate leadership is fixated on the next handful of quarters at most. The less-skilled only on the next quarter and no further. I don't personally think capitalism and corporations are good ideas in general, but they also seem to be failing quite spectacularly at their own stated advantages at this point which I don't think gets brought up enough.
German engineering salaries are definitely not cheaper. If you want cheaper then hire people from Poland, Romania or even Spain, Portugal.
This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
He switched to software.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
And education is unfortunately one of those things with diseconomies of scale. The US has worse wealth disparities, health disparities, nutrition disparities, and greater cultural variation than all of our peers.
The US isn't spending more than everyone else, but you really would expect them to have to do so to reach parity with others.
And how much they lie, too. After all Trump promised to bring jobs to the USA. Well, he lied. And so did Amazon etc...
Saw a major brewery that operated like this too. Flew in Belgian technicians to do the really valuable work.
A tell-tale sign that you're touching the third rail.
Your contractors made so much not because they are from Germany but because they were freelancers. And if they weren't, they probably had less take-home pay after taxes than your father had, despite the company paying 3 times as much. I'm an engineer with 10 years experience and I make 65k _before_ taxes. Barely over 3k net per month. Many others would be happy to even have a job in the current economic climate. And before you Americans come with "muh free health care": I wait 9 months for an appointment and paid almost 10k last year out of pocket for orthopedic work.
Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.
Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.
What share of the investor money is from USA?
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
When I worked for KeyW Corporation I had shares with the company, and every time they did anything they made announcements, like if they acquired someone. I had left the company and during my leave Jacobs Engineering bought out KeyW, sold off some of their own business endeavours and paid off all of KeyW's debt and shifted their focus towards government contracting and less so in oil infrastrcuture (if I remember correctly, Jacobs is a big company). This was all publicly announced.
The startup doesn't need to disclose anything, but if a public company invested in them, they will eventually have to do a quarterly report and disclose it.
And in these business numbers is usually some type of (rough) balance sheet,and on balance sheets you will see your holdings in other companies. (because accounting standards require it)
Just for underlining your "not posting is always an option" ;)
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
It's just weird attitude.
As long as there is no investors from Europe, these startups will just be a money funnel to America.
Note specifically, my emphasis.
"alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective"
And companies here (in eu) would immediately create a competitor. As long as we both "eat" we're friends.
What US has a great entrepreneurial culture but it is extremely inefficient and the Chinese appear to be innovating much faster with much less drama, utilizing the resources much better. Chinese phones for example have much better batteries and some other specs although Apple has upper hand in branding and UX, Chinese are on par or even better in AI and really very few things are more advanced in US.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to give 100s of billions of money to a guy to spend on 3D avatars and goggles just because figured out social media? I bet you that if US had better distribution of wealth(not talking about socialism, just greater number of middle class people and even billionaires that are not all commanding 10s of billions) it wouldn't have ben "90% US and China" but %90 US. This %90 US and China combination seems to be tipping more and more in China's favor. More like %50 US %40 China, up from %70 US %20 China from a few years ago?
If anything, US looks more and more like late imperial Europe these days with nationalism, desires to have a king(and desire to get rid of that king), conserve instead of innovate, identity and pedigree over meritocracy, gender control, sex control, control of the politics by wealthy families or individuals, fascist ideals and so on.
The primary reason people immigrate to America is so that they can make money or become wealthy in some way. That’s it, there’s no other driver, so in general (not universally) the public doesn’t care whether you get your money from, cause they figure it’s yours now.
Why is that? It’s because it’s the simplest country to start a company and tons of liquid money is here.
You literally only have to have a legal resident of a state create an LLC with somewhere between 10 and $50, and you can start accepting payments for services the same day as incorporating the organization.
The regulations are only on enforcement when they get caught, and fines are usually manageable if you’re profitable, for the major majority of labor activities.
I just don’t think people understand the uniquely anarchic reason America continues to dominate capitalism: “Nobody is practically going to stop you from starting something cause you just move states which have different laws but the money flows fine”
https://dealroom.co/charts/us-hubs-map
60% of the entire world's startup funding comes from the US.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
Whatever makes you feel better, I guess?
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
[1] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
If a roofing company can complete three jobs in a month compared to one job without a goods lift then renting one for each job makes economic sense, especially if it's physically easier too.
Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.
[0] https://www.meritshot.com/rolls-royce-case-study
EDIT: wording
As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
And not sure what RobCo is doing exactly, but LLMs are probably part of it as well.
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details. This honestly looks more like an advertisement, which doesn't tell me much about how progress is going.
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
That is not true anymore. Nowadays factory operators are quite open to cloud-hosted products when it saves operating costs.
Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and released the Cortana assistant in 2014. It wasn't a stolen name. It was purchased and part of their portfolio for over a decade.
Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.
But maybe most people don't have half a brain.
this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?
Edit : typo
> Why Mordor Intelligence Private Limited is a Great Place To Work
https://www.greatplacetowork.in/great/company/mordor-intelli...
> Pottery Workshop. Roleplays in Entrepreneurship Training
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/about-us/csr
Feels a bit more like some Doctor Who-ish happy-sounding evilcorp than Omni Consumer Products
SCNR
They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.
The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.
Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t it a similar market?
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
> Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
You're probably thinking of Rethink Robotics in Boston.
Its first model was the two-arm "Baxter", very popular at universities and research labs. The second model was the single-armed Sawyer, much more capable, with built-in vision, which sold several thousand units to small manufacturers.
Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks. The robots were originally built in the Boston location, and later by a contract manufacturer in New Hampshire. In 2018, the company was unable to find a buyer and shut down operations. The brand and the remaining inventory was purchased by a German distributor, but eventually the robots were sunset, afaik.
Discussion then:
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
Europe shut down more than 20 Diesel refineries in the past 20 years and then we cry that Diesel is too expensive and blame the Americans. Pathetic.
Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
If Europe did not shut down domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to buy oil and gas from Russia then oil and gas would be a lot cheaper today.
Blaming the Americans for what we did to ourselves is insane and rooted in deep ignorance of what actually happened in Europe in the past two decades.
But yet again this just shows how totally dependent we in Europe are on Americans for everything. Pathetic.
Wasn't the Hormuz straight perfectly fine before the USA decided to... well do whatever they did?
Instead, we went in for the Green energy scam which has not made our energy cheaper or more reliable and has not significantly reduced fossil fuel dependence and has made us totally dependent on the foreign suppliers and manufacturers. We don't even want to produce the windmills and solar panels domestically.
All of this is insane, and if the US stops underwriting our security we cannot survive. Yes sure, the European economy is better than Russia's economy, but most people in Europe has no interest in fighting in a defensive war, so if Russia with the backing of China actually does challenge us we are likely done for. Russia's money also stretches much further than ours, and they don't have to worry about their approval ratings if they mobilize their military because they are not a democracy. No German government will remain in power if they mobilize.
And let's not forget that our Nuclear umbrella providers, France and the UK, both seems on the brink of internal collapse with repeated riots and high levels of disaffection by the vast swathes of their imported populations that feel absolutely no sense of belonging with the host population and countries, and high levels of resentment and disgruntlement of the native populations with the utter failure of centre-left governance.
I really don't understand how anyone seriously believes that if the US withdraws support for Europe that France and the UK will actually go to war to defend any other European country, never mind themselves. They are much more likely to just immediately collapse internally.
All of this is deeply shameful, and it was us Europeans that chose this vassalage. We have to start choosing better. We can be the dominant power in the world. We can be the hegemony, a much better one than the US, if we get serious and choose it.
So doubling... roughly nothing? Europe is importing almost all its oil and gas, right?
> If we went for the only viable green energy source we have, which is Nuclear
Well I do agree that it was unfortunate that Germany (and others) actively avoided nuclear power. Though it's nice that renewables are improving, too.
> if Russia with the backing of China actually does challenge us we are likely done for
Really? Russia has been fighting Ukraine for years. You're saying that Russia can easily beat a much larger part of Europe? How?
> France and the UK, both seems on the brink of internal collapse with repeated riots
Times are hard. Germany does not look that good with AfD, if you ask me.
> high levels of disaffection by the vast swathes of their imported populations that feel absolutely no sense of belonging with the host population and countries, and high levels of resentment and disgruntlement of the native populations with the utter failure of centre-left governance.
Not sure where you're going, this sounds racist.
> if the US withdraws support for Europe that France and the UK will actually go to war to defend any other European country
When did the US last go to war to defend any European country again?
> We can be the dominant power in the world
Is that the goal? I just want to live in peace.
The americans kind of forced you off the russian gas though
> Now everyone is crying about insane fossil fuel prices after our policy for more than a decade was to make fossil fuel non-viable. Pathetic.
I think its not only fossil fuel. Germany's decision to shut down nuclear power plants (while also trying to get to net zero C02 emissions) is outright suicidal imo.
Germany shutting down nuclear and coal powered plants was their own decision. I kind of agree with your evaluation, but confusingly it seems like they want it like that (?)
The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited.
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
Weren't germans so accurate in the past? The AI slop degrades all quality.
I prefer the variant in the movie from 1987.
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
By the time we get robots capable of folding laundry, we'd already have solved many, many other use-cases.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.
I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
Germans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).
The downvotes are puzzling.