AlleyCorp Deep Tech | May Newsletter
May 2024 | Introducing AlleyCorp Deep Tech - Robotics and Beyond
Hey everyone,
I hope you are enjoying the start of the warmer weather. It has been great to see the robotics communities in NYC and Boston get more active with events.
In this month’s edition of our newsletter we will cover a range of exciting updates including 1) Our expansion into adjacent areas beyond robotics (AlleyCorp Deep Tech), 2) Recent events at AlleyCorp and 3) Going more in depth about what robot companies we want to see throughout the back half of 2024. This will be a good one.
Don't hesitate to email, message, or comment with any thoughts, questions, or feedback.
Enjoy!
Brannon Jones | LinkedIn X Substack
AlleyCorp Deep Tech - Robotics and Beyond
You might have noticed the subtle change in our Website or LinkedIn branding over the last month, so Abe and I wanted to formally announce it here! We are now officially AlleyCorp Deep Tech.
We have built expertise in the robotics sector, and will continue to double (and triple) down on investing in this category, but we have been increasingly finding that robotics is naturally steering us into two exploding adjacent areas: Aerospace, and Advanced Manufacturing (which we define as industrials, semiconductors, materials science, and energy production).
Stepping back, this expansion makes perfect sense. Robotics is an inherently horizontal platform - meaning it can be applied productively across multiple industries. This quality, paired with the fact that robotics has long shown the highest TRLs of any deep tech technology, makes it a kind of “gateway” to other sectors in the hard sciences. Now with the recent breakthroughs in AI for robotics, growing semiconductor demand, and the resurgence of aerospace and defense tech, we are seeing a dramatic uptake of robotics and relevant technologies in both advanced manufacturing and aerospace.
As an added bonus of the expansion, many of the founder (and funder) networks across these landscapes have natural overlaps and linkages. For AlleyCorp Deep Tech this means that we can be extremely helpful, knowledgeable, and engaged across all three sectors right away, and continue to be the best-in-class investing team across these categories.
Finally, we just think these areas are super darn cool and bring us back to our engineering heydays 😎!
Feat. younger Abe - The wunderkind computer engineer
Feat. younger Brannon - The rocket propulsion manufacturing engineer
Upcoming Events at AlleyCorp
Peerless Pitch Competition (Register here for the final Event)
AlleyCorp is hosting Peerless Pitch alongside MLT - A pitch competition designed to help Black, Latine, Native American and female founders scale their vision from an early stage. We’ve recently announced our top 5 Finalists. Meet them here!
We will be investing $1,000,000 in one founder on an uncapped convertible note with a 20% discount - but the money is not the only benefit. Along the way, we are hosting events for our finalists to meet investors, experienced entrepreneurs, and ecosystem players to help strengthen networks. In addition, we are providing dedicated 1:1 coaching and mentoring. Our goal is broader than making one good investment, we believe that diversity in innovation will lead to more generational companies being built and better outcomes for the world at large.
The final event on June 20th will bring together VCs, strategic partners, founders, and of course our finalists for a live pitch-off in front of a panel of judges to determine the winner. Submit your interest to attend here and feel free to share with your network.
AlleyCorp sponsoring Robotics Invest 2024
Robotics Invest 2024 is coming up on June 11th and 12th. We are sponsoring this conference alongside Cybernetix ventures and are very excited to share that Abe will be leading a panel on climate robotics!
Make sure to grab your ticket and stop by to say hello to us in-person. We’ve been attending this event since its inception, and it is one of the best robotics events in the country - This year will be no exception. We are looking forward to seeing the world of robotics converge in Boston!
This year’s conversation topics include
📈 Robotics as an Investment Class Part II
🧠 AI's Impact on Robotics Applications
🌎 The Critical Role of Robotics in Climate Tech
💸 The Acquisition Landscape and Public Markets for Robotics Companies
🤖 Closing Debate: Humanoids - Reality or Hype?
May Travel and Events
With the warm weather comes lots (and lots) of travel, get-togethers, happy hours, pitch competitions, and other shoulder rubbing events. I’ve also recently spent enough time in The ‘Gundo that a matte black Cybertruck is on my 2024 Christmas list…
This past month we are excited to share snippets from our time at the Robotics Summit, Automate 2024, and EFL Frontiers 2024.
Abe attended this year’s Robotics Summit & Expo and our company Mapless AI was a huge hit on the floor. If you are interested in autonomous or teleoperated driving - check Mapless out!
I (Brannon) served as judge for the Automate Startup Challenge pitch competition where we gave $10K to the winner. This year Sasi Prabhakaran and the Snowbotix team took the crown!
I also attended EFL’s Frontiers 2024 deep tech track and Abe has been a long time mentor for the program. This particular accelerator has an incredible batting average for producing unicorn potential deep tech companies.
What we are looking for in our next Robotics investments
Abe and I love the robotics sector and believe generational companies are in the early stages and being built today. As the 2024 robotics funding ecosystem booms, we felt it appropriate to take some time to share insights about the most investable industries, and trends in robotics. This builds on our foundational robotics thesis work I mentioned in our December ‘23 newsletter (here is a link for anyone who’d like a refresher).
In general, we are laser focused on finding companies who create high geometric value (more on that to come in a later post), who are extremely capital efficient, and are driving complexity from hardware to software by leveraging the latest AI technologies to improve their robot’s performance.
Indexing the most robotics ready industries
We will continue to focus on robotic solutions addressing industries that are experiencing the highest labor shortages, including food and restaurant automation, warehouse and transportation logistics, construction and infrastructure, system integration technologies, healthcare focused robotics solutions, and manufacturing. As we dig into each of these opportunities we will remain vigilant to map, identify, and refine our thinking.
As we looked back at 2023, we found that the sectors with the largest labor shortages aligned with the top 8 categories for which we met the most startups addressing industry specific challenges (yes I manually analyzed the ~1,000 seed stage robotics companies we came across). That alignment gives us confidence that 1) the industry trends we are focusing on are valid problems to be addressed, 2) we are seeing a representative slice (and likely the vast majority) of the early stage robotics startup market, 3) we will have the best insight for what good and great really looks like and can share that to support founders (and the robotics ecosystem at large).
Side note: The only caveats to my claims above are that robotics solutions in the retail industry are underreported in the market today (placed #18 by number of appearances on our list, whereas it is comes up as #4 on the list of industries with the most severe labor shortages). This may mean that the retail robotics opportunity is under penetrated, or that robotic innovation is not being well adopted here yet by customers. This could be an opportunity to find a winner… If you are building robotics for retail, we want to know!
Finally, even if your robot doesn't exactly fit what we’ve described here - still reach out. We are always honing our thinking and every founder knows something we do not. Just because we didn't mention it here does not mean it can’t be a generational company.
~🤖🤙🏾
And that’s a wrap!
So that's what we have for you this time around! I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’ve made it this far, you may as well subscribe. Please feel free to reach out to me with any follow up thoughts, comments, or suggestions, and of course, we are always interested in meeting Deep Tech founders. Thanks for reading and keep building!
Cheers,
AlleyCorp Deep Tech team (Abe & Brannon)