Interviewee
Bradley Dillon, CEO at Luxonis, a company making the core technology that allows you to embed human-level perception into small, low-power products. High resolution cameras with depth vision and on chip machine learning.
Transcript
Bradley Dillon: So my name is Bradley Dillon and I'm the CEO at Luxonis And so Luxonis is a team of really just engineers. We have 67 people, but 54 of them are engineers. So we're, so we're a team of engineers that all just joined Luxonis around this kind of shared goal of being able to make robotic vision easy. So historically, like circa five years ago, if a company was trying to put together a kind of a machine vision sort of system, it was really difficult. You had to grab a bunch of different hardware, try to figure out all the firmware and software to make it work.
And enterprises were spending millions of dollars and it was taking years to be able to do these types of systems. And so we were formed around just trying to really simplify that and we're trying to commoditize the entire space all the way down to the, to the hardware. And so we do hardware, firmware software. We also do artificial intelligence training, we also do simulation, and then we have a cloud application layer as well. So we're a product platform play and we're trying to become like the, the de facto platform that's kind of like the eyes, ears, and brains behind kind of robotic systems, but also like automation systems. So, yeah, so that's what it looks onis.
Elisa Muñoz: Great. Thank you so much for being straight to the point. Talking about the company and products, I know that you guys launched a new robot called RAE, if I'm correct. So that was a couple of months ago. Can you talk a little bit about it?
Bradley Dillon: Yeah, of course. So for those that are watching the video, this is one of our prototypes of Ray, this cute little thing. And so it stands for robotic access for everyone. And the reason why we wanted to create a robot, it's not because we wanna be a robotics company. That's not our goal at all. We generally wanna be the perception system, but with our series three of products, we have some new capabilities that we really want to highlight for customers.
So for the first time, our devices can actually be used as a host to control other, other types of sensors and devices. And so that's where I say when we wanna be the brains, we wanna be kind of a control hub behind people's systems. And then the other piece that we'll be rolling out with RAE is our cloud application layer, which is called Robot Hub. And so this makes it so that a user, when they get this robot, they'll be able to download the application on their, you know, their phone or tablet and then they can do all kinds of fun games like right out of the box. So they could do things like follow me hide and go seek, they could have it like map their house, things like that. And so we're really excited about being able to have that cloud application layer and we really wanted to highlight that by making our own robot robot with it.
I would say the things that are most rewarding would be getting to see the teams that we have of engineers being able to solve a really meaningful problem at scale for our customers.
Elisa Muñoz: Talking with different CEOs in the industry, everyone says that you have to be all hands on deck and I'm pretty sure that's not easy at all. So what do you say is the best part of the job, especially at the company? Of course.
Bradley Dillon: Yeah. Oh my gosh, there's so many great parts. I, I really do, I really do love all of it. I love my job. I, you know, I love Lexis. I would say the things that are most rewarding would be getting to see, you know, the, the, the teams that we have of engineers that they're able to like actually solve like a really meaningful problem at scale for our customers. You know, our, our, our, that are businesses. And that's the most rewarding, right? Is to be able to see this pain point that a customer has and then be able to actually like, solve it, but not just like solve it in a decent kind of way, but solve it in a way where customers are like, oh wow. Like you can do that, that's incredible. Like, we had no idea this is, this is great. Like we wanna roll this out faster. So I say that that's the most meaningful piece for me and really probably ties back into just being really about engineering efficiency and just trying to be able to, you know, improve that and enable our customers to improve that. And in a lot of cases our types of products are being used to really improve like the human condition in some way. And that could be like assisting a worker with a repetitive task. It could be like removing a task from needing to be done by a worker in general. And so that's just like the coolest, most tangible part of the job I'd say that I love the most.
Elisa Muñoz: And talking about the next steps for Luxonis, what will you say they are? Are you guys planning, expanding soon?
Bradley Dillon: Yeah, absolutely. So two big exciting things. One of them is related to that cloud application layer that I called a robot hub. And our commercial version of that is actually launching later this month. So we're really excited about that. And what you'll be able to do there is, is that for the types of devices that you see that you see back here, it means that you would like to stream the data from them anywhere in the world. You can set up automatic recording triggers. You also can do applications. So you could say, okay, like if this happens, I want to be able to, or sorry, I've given an example of an application, like a box measurement app. You can basically go, oh, I can point my device at a box and it'll say, here's the XYZ dimensions of the box, here's the volume of the box. So cool fun apps like that will be available on it. It'll be launching later this month. So that's the most exciting thing that we have coming up. And then, yeah, stay tuned for luxon us. We're insane, which means that we try to launch an entire new generation of products every 12 to 18 months. So we're on series three now, and by early next year we'll be on series four and we're really excited about series four, so stay tuned for that.
Elisa Muñoz: From your perspective, what do you think the future of the industry, the Yeah, the tech industry is going?
Bradley Dillon: You know, I think that it's, it's been really interesting to be a part of this, this, this current period here. I think that artificial intelligence has definitely become a lot hotter of late. And I think that we're seeing businesses are willing to invest more, both from an opex and a CapEx perspective on being able to use AI to both solve some of the tricky problems, but also just help them with a lot of automation, right? We're seeing, we're seeing that that a lot as a, is a big trend. So that's kind of more, more, more short term where I see businesses going. And then I think long-term, what we're looking at over the next, you know, this is long, long-term, but like, you know, 20, 20 plus years is, is that I think that the, with computer vision and ai, we can kind of have the type of revolution that we used that we had for like white collar workers and offices with laptops.
I think we can have that type of revolution when it comes to the physical world that's out there. So any, any type of human labor that's being done, any, anything that's kind of repetitive that humans do or anything just where humans are observing something, right? So a simple thing would be like security, things like that. So I think that over the next 20 years that's gonna happen and it's really going to improve the human condition and I think it's gonna be really exciting to be able to be a part of, and I'd be excited to see what actually happens.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or CEOs starting on this path?
Bradley Dillon: Yeah, for sure. I could, I could, I could, I could talk all day on advice. Of course, of course. Most, most advice isn't very good because it's just tailored to your own situation. But I guess I'd say I was recently at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and it was really cool. It was like walking into the future, one of the things I noticed is that a lot of the products that were out there were products that were really cool and neat. Like I was like that that's awesome. But like, they didn't seem like they were really tailored towards solving a real problem. And so I guess my, my advice more from kind of putting my entrepreneurial hat on is to, you know, make sure that you're, you really are clear on the problem that you're trying to go after and that you're not just kind of developing something because it's cool and neat and you sort of hope it'll find something to, to solve later. So that's the advice that I'd say, and that's the approach that we use is we really just try to work backwards from our customers' problems and then tailor our, you know, product platform to be a solution for them.
Elisa Muñoz: Perfect. Thank you so much for sharing and for joining us today.
Bradley Dillon: Thank you so much.
