AlleyCorp Robotics | May 2023 Newsletter

May 4, 2023

Hey friends - new month, new robotics newsletter!  This is the way¹.  🤖 

Kicking the month off with four big ideas, followed by a fund update.  Our news rollup lands next week - trying a new format splitting one big thing into two digestible bits.  

Don’t miss the events list at the end - you’re invited to a cocktail reception with the team at Viam next week after the Robotics Summit day is done in Boston!  I’ll be there - will you?

Big Idea #1 | Robotics is climbing out of the hype cycle’s trough of despair

Generative AI is the current hype cycle darling.  Lots of trend chasing.  Yes, huge winners will result.  Huge losers too.  Add a few years, and we’ll welcome this trend to the trough as well - this is the way.

So what about robots?  We asked GPT4.  Our AI overlords were harsh - we’re in the trough.  Here at AlleyCorp, this excites us - we’ve hit peak expectations, early investment has come in, great companies are building, and we can focus on investing and delivering societal value.   What do you think?

Big Idea #2 | Robotics companies are well positioned for the new normal

TechCrunch’s Brian Heater included us in their recent robotics investor survey.  Thanks Brian!  We had a lot to say about our approach.  (For fellow investors - we’d love to have more friends investing in robots too!  Copy our playbook, add your own flavor - come join us!  The water is great 🌊).  Sharing one quote with you from the article:

Robotics companies must have great business models to account for their significant CAPEX requirements, so in many ways, they were well-positioned for the shift in the environment. We will continue investing in great companies regardless of the macro environment.

More recently, Digits to Dollars published a piece on the big wins ahead for hardware investors, and the lack of VCs actually focusing on this.  We couldn’t agree more, and jumped into the conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn.  Alley Robotics and our friends in deep tech are leading the way!

Big Idea #3 | We want more readers - and we know you can help us find them!

Our newsletter is reaching just over a thousand folks - not bad for only a few issues in - but far from the hundreds of thousands of amazing builders and employees in robotics and automation companies around the world.  We need your help getting them on board!

I will be shameless in working to find these people 🤣.  I believe the businesses people are building in this space are important to the future for my kids, and frankly, just a ton of fun to be part of!  Can I ask you to be shameless in helping me? 

1. Forward this to friends - help get the word out!

2. Post this to social media - same same!

3. Send me clever growth ideas - secret unlock codes!

On the third point - no-one in this space has hit the scale this market deserves.  I’d like to find a clever way to grow - by growing a community - and growing a newsletter for all of us together.  There must be some smart way to do this others haven’t tried yet.  Send us your ideas!

Big Idea #4 | There is no fourth idea, and no GIFs, and your refund is in the mail

You opened this newsletter for our fun robot GIFs right?  Well - they say to leave them wanting more!  Those will come next week with our larger robotic news rollup by sector. 

Enjoy 🤖💲📈!

~Abe

PS - we tried something different this time - reply to this email and let us know what you think!

PPS - help us grow and find friends - forward our newsletter to five friends 💌, send us ♥️ on Twitter - @abemurray and LinkedIn - Abe Murray ✨

Alley Robotics | fund update

• AlleyCorp had a great Q1! - AlleyCorp is more than robots

  • AlleyCorp is deep into healthcare, materials, impact, marketplaces, dev tools, and more!  

  • Read more at our Q1 newsletter here.

• Robotics companies are hiring - come build the future!

  • Alley Robotics companies are hiring - aescape, ARIX, Civ Robotics, Earth Force, Mapless, and Renovate are all looking for great folks!

  • Continued props to Brian Heater for collecting this list of robotics jobs!

• Robot events rock - Robotics Invest & NYC Robotics Meetup

  • Alley Robotics is sponsoring the upcoming Robotics Invest summit here in Boston alongside our friends at Cybernetix, and F-Prime - let us know if you’re interested!

  • We’ll be at the Robotics Summit & Expo for Eliot’s talk on The Era of Robotic Unicorns

  • We’ll be at the Viam’s Cocktail Reception following the summit - RSVP and join us!

  • We’ll be at Automate judging the Phoenix Contact Startup Challenge on May 23

  • We sponsored the NYC Robotics Meetup last week in Brooklyn

• Have news & events to share? - Let us know!

  • Email us with your announcements, open roles, opinions, and/or cute animal pictures.

And that’s a wrap!

Thanks for reading ² and keep building!

[∵┌]└[ ∵ ]┘[┐∵]┘

~Abe & The Alley Robotics Ventures Team

Footnotes (because we’re nerds, and love footnotes!)

1. Where is the Mandalorian emoji? My 9 year old wants to know…

2. You’re receiving this email because you were signed up for it using our prior newsletter system - we’ve imported our friends of the fund into Substack now, so you can manage your subscription using this system moving forward.