Summary

Manesh Jain, Founder of Flo Mobility, joins the show to discuss building autonomous construction robots in India. Flo Mobility pivoted from autonomous e-scooters to agriculture and finally to construction, where they identified a massive opportunity. Their robots move 4-5x more material per trip than manual labor and deliver 40-45% cost efficiency for contractors. Customers include L&T, Shobha, Godrej, PST, and Embassy. They are also live in the UAE, where the pitch shifts from material efficiency to end-to-end process improvement. Manesh shares insights on how to find niche white spaces for Physical AI startups: marry customer pain point urgency with technology maturity. Flo Mobility collected data by running machines via remote control operators for 6 months before enabling full autonomy.

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners and welcome back to The Offline Network. Today's show features one founder and he is building in a space which is very interesting and this is the world of autonomous construction robots. Our guest today is Manesh Jain of Flo Mobility, Manesh, welcome to the show.

Manesh Jain (Flo Mobility): Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Utsav Somani: Manesh, so you were previously in our live stream environment. We are now going to talk about how you got here, the journey, the product, and also touch upon the physical AI data question, which is something that we are quite interested in. So, let's start with the journey. How did you get to Flo Mobility? What is the product that you're building and why construction?

Manesh Jain (Flo Mobility): Got it. So let me answer the first, second question first. And then I'll come to how we solve the data problem. So we started as an autonomous mobility company. That's why the word mobility in the name. Then we said we will build autonomous e-scooters. Very soon we realized that the market is not ready. This was early 2021, late 2021, early 2022. We realized, no, this is not something which is going to work because the market will take time to evolve. The micro mobility or the last mile mobility itself was going through a transition that time post COVID. So we kind of said, no, this is not really working. And as a startup, we need to find something where the need is a bit more urgent. So we moved to agriculture from there and spent almost a year to solve for autonomous e-scooters in agriculture. And we realized, no, again, India is not a place. So either we decide to stop everything in India and go to a different market or find a use case in India. That's how from agriculture we moved to construction. And then the moment we entered into construction, we realized that it's a massive, massive opportunity because there are so many things to be done. And the technology penetration is actually very, very big. And eventually it's a global problem. So we were very clear that we don't want to solve for them. We could have technical expansion, as they say, that I should be able to do more use cases and geographical expansion also that we should be able to go to more places.

Dhruv Sharma: Manish, before we switch to the Rita question, which is an important one, staying with construction, what's the reception from the industry been like? Who are the developers you're working with? What is typically the pitch to them?

Manesh Jain (Flo Mobility): Sure. So traditionally, the industry is a very value conscious. So you have this builder, but most of the builders will probably outsource to a general contractor. Contractors are basically our customers because they are the ones who are doing this actual work of building something. So contractors is our primary target market. And we have people like L&T, Shobha, Godrej, PST, Aluvalia, Embassy, Sriram, some 15-20 large customers in India who are now using our products. So initially, our kind of pitch was, it has refined a lot now, but initially our pitch was, we'll help you move the material faster and we'll move the more material. So today we move 100-120 kgs in one go versus we will move 500 kgs on day one. It's like four times more material we are trying to move in. And because it's motorized, their speed also will increase. We will move more material in a lesser time. Now, after we have all the case studies and data from the market, we are able to very confidently say that it is bringing around 40-45% efficiency on cost.

Utsav Somani: And you are live in the UAE as well. So, I mean, how has your pitch changed or is it the same across the world, wherever you go?

Manesh Jain (Flo Mobility): The pitch there is more on the safety aspects, the ability to do things at the right time because there the pace of construction is faster. Generally, we have seen that the speed at which UAE builds is faster than the speed that they build in India. And that is how our pitch is that because the speed of construction is faster, your downstream activity moves more material faster. Let me help you move this material faster. Versus in India, it is more on within this activity, how much are you helping in saving time. So, the pitch is slightly wider when you go to Middle East market where we are talking about end-to-end process improvement rather than just material help.

Dhruv Sharma: Mahesh, I have a question for you. But before that, I'm going to say you should absolutely talk to Elon, because I think he can use all the help he can get to build cities and masts, but we're not going to be able to send enough people. So in the first Starship, the first Starship should be packed full of flow mobility robots so that the robots can go and construct the first.

Manesh Jain (Flo Mobility): Absolutely. We'll go to Mars, but let's start from a slum in India first, and then we'll reach Mars.

Utsav Somani: Manish, this has been super nice, but I think we missed the data question as well. For us building in physical AI, I think it's very interesting to learn from you given that you're operating in a very hard industry as well, construction. That vertical seems extremely, extremely tough and kudos to you for doing that. So how can founders choose these niche white spaces, or not niche, but white spaces which have not been captured before and build unique AI data sets?

Manesh Jain (Flo Mobility): I think for a founder to narrow down on a niche, one of the first and foremost things is how ready my customer is. And is he really asking for this? Is it a pain point for him which he wants to solve today? Or is this something which is good to have for tomorrow? So marry that pain point with a maturity of underlying technology. Whatever technology disruption that you're building, it should be mature enough to meet that use case to a certain extent. So when these two things come together, app tech maturity and a customer's adoption maturity when they come together is when the magic happens, when a startup can build a winning product. Specifically to also answer the data question that we are talking about, I think it's kind of becoming a norm now where whenever you have to automate something, the first thing to do is put sensors on people who are doing it today and try to understand how it is being done. In our case, it was like a different variation of that. What we did was we said, okay, let's run our machines through a remote control operation for a while. So for first five, six months, the machines are not autonomous. We had an operator who was actually running these machines and he was going along with the machine everywhere. And in that process, we collected a lot of data. Customer wouldn't pay you for collecting data. So customer is only paying you because his work is getting done. And in that process, we are able to collect data and then use that data to train our models, which eventually can now make the machine run in that same environment or fully autonomously without operation.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on our show. Wishing you all the best. Construction industry could use a redo.

Manesh Jain (Flo Mobility): Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Really looking forward and great chatting with you.

Utsav Somani: Awesome, Manish. Thank you you. All right, listeners. That's it. Short and sweet from us this Monday. Wednesday with Ruben, I'm taking a break. We'll see you on Friday. Have a wonderful, wonderful week ahead. Thank you. Bye-bye.