Interviewee
Timothy Morrissey is the Founder and CEO of Artimus Robotics, a venture backed robotics company, changing the way the world moves.
He describes himself as an entrepreneur and founder who is able to use his diverse skill sets - ranging from technical, to emotion, to creative, to analytical - to tackle the various challenges of starting a successful venture.
Transcript
Elisa Muñoz: Welcome to Builder Nation Tim!
Tim Morrissey: Thank you. Excited to be here.
So I'm Tim Morrissey, co-founder and CEO of Artimus robotics. I have a background in mechanical engineering and material science RNs. Robotics is a spin-out of the university of Colorado. Some work I did during my PhD, along with my co-founders. We've got four fantastic PhD co-founders and Artemus is commercializing a new type of soft actuator technology. We call Hazel artificial muscles.
Elisa Muñoz: Okay. Wow. That was a good pitch. A straight to the point pitch. And how did you and your co-founders like come up with this idea?
Tim Morrissey: We met during our PhD program, and the idea for soft robotics has been around for a while. Like way back in the fifties, people were interested in artificial muscles or like devices that worked like humans did. Right? So the whole concept behind soft robotics is really that we're constantly trying to make robots or systems, you know, move more like you. And that's when we're automating something, we're usually taking a task from a person and trying to get a machine to do it. And so the concept is, okay, why is a person so good at that? And can we take inspiration from people or from nature if you would to move forward. And so with that, how does nature work?
We use soft compliant muscles on top of a rigid skeleton structure. So when we say soft, we literally mean physically soft, right? You can move it, you can reform it. And so that's where the inspiration from our technology and the soft robotics field as a whole comes from that natural, that natural inspiration. I mean, it's the same thing as artificial intelligence, no one actually ever thinks about what it is, AI, right? We're trying to just replicate how people are thinking. And we're trying to do the same thing over in the physical space. And so we were, our fundamental technology was really just time to do it really nicely.
There's been plenty of academic attempts at making soft robotic actuators or soft actuators in the past. And we kind of took a couple that had been around, took inspiration from a few, merged them together and brought forward what, what we bring.
Elisa Muñoz: Nice. And was it really hard for you to get investors at the beginning?
Tim Morrissey: So it's certainly always a challenge with early stage hardware, right? There's not a ton of investor landscape for that. We were really fortunate that we're in Colorado, which has a really robust startup ecosystem. I would argue it's as robust as the Bay area in a lot of ways, whether it'd be like the Techstar community here or the university community. So we had a lot of help coming up through that ecosystem. And we had a kind of a nice gradual runway as we finished our PhDs. We actually got some grant funding from both state and federal levels. And then also kind of leverage that into some seed stage investment as well.
So we did raise right in the middle of COVID actually like March 20, April, 2020. So that was, that was character building for sure. But it all, it all worked out. And since then, you know, we do have, we are venture backed, but we continue to do a lot of government work and leave and do corporate work already. So we get a decent amount of our revenue just from corporate customers. Because we sell development products today. So we don't have anything on the market in mass production, but we kind of borrow from the software community, right ship, early ship off and make mistakes. And we're putting our actuators, our technology in boxes and sending it to customers.
It’s pretty much on a weekly basis. There's some weeks that we don't send something out, but pretty regularly we're putting things in other people's hands so they can get hands-on experience with our products.
Elisa Muñoz: I love how excited you sound about this part of the process. That I'm pretty sure it's not as easy. So how involved are you in the actual hardware process?
Tim Morrissey: You know, I'm in my office most days, these days back in the day I did more. Actually, my personal contributions were more on the electrical aspects of it, usually on the controls and efficiency aspects. So the other guys are making it now and we're a team of seven. And so actually luckily none of the founders have to spend too much time making actuators anymore. We have, we have helped to do that, but we're still doing plenty of it.
I always just say, take action as early as possible. Just sell early, sell often and communicate with everyone. Some really good advice I got from a founder that exited a large public company was “Take every meeting until you just can't anymore”.
Elisa Muñoz: Okay. And what kind of specific problem you were trying to solve whenever you first built the company?
Tim Morrissey: Fundraising, for sure. Like just getting the resources to actually move the needle in any measurable direction. And then, I mean, the only job of a startup is to define your product market fit. And we have a platform technology and we are, we're a component provider. And so inherently we're going to have a diverse customer base, you know, selling the same widget to customer A, B and C all using it in different ways, but selling them the same product. And so that's really been a challenge of balancing, you know, a customer that likes what you have today versus a bigger customer or a bigger market that would love what you could build tomorrow and just kind of operate around. All of that's been interesting, challenging, and, but also very rewarding. So we have about 30 customers throughout the lifetime of the company so far all touching different aspects.
So we're proud of that in our three years to have that many. And, but at the same time, it certainly is a strain on resources on people's time specifically.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow. I had no idea that you also like working with the government. This is really interesting.
Tim Morrissey: Oh yeah. So the US Navy was our first customer. They were trying to place an order like before we even legally formed the company way back in late 2018, we would actually rent time in an academic lab to build our things because we didn't even have the equipment yet. And so we have some really compelling use cases with the US Navy who continue, they've engaged with us the whole way through. They're still very, very engaged talking to them on a regular basis. And then we also work with the US army. We work with NASA and we work with RPE, which is a DOE entity as well. And so yeah, we have a lot of interests from the defense and, and kind of government space, which has been great for us. Cause it's, it's brought in quite a, quite a bit of, of resources.
Elisa Muñoz: Oh, that's great. And now, I mean, for something, for someone not familiar with engineering,could you explain how an actuator works?
Tim Morrissey: An actuator is just a device that makes things move traditionally. It takes electrical energy and converts it into mechanical energy. So it takes an electrical signal and makes something like physically move on you, your actuators are your muscles, your biceps, your hamstrings, things like that. So we're just helping different industries move in ways they couldn't before. And so there's traditional actuators out there that might run on like air, like a compressed cylinder that pushes air or there's electric versions. And then there's all sorts of different experimental ones. Like PA's, those are shaped memories. Alloys are thermally activated ones.
Elisa Muñoz: Okay. So you are like all over different industries. What will you say it's the most rewarding one that you have ever worked with?
Tim Morrissey: They're all pretty rewarding, even though even the more minor ones I would say more recently. So one of the interesting aspects of our technology is that it's soft and compliant and flexible. And that actually turns out to be a really nice benefit in the area of what we call human machine interfaces, or anytime a person is interacting with an actuator. And so, because we're software compliant, we'd like to have flexible things, touch us. And so we're spending a lot of time in compression space that gets us into the medical applications.
Elisa Muñoz: Have you had any technical challenges when it came to the pandemic?
Tim Morrissey: Yeah. Yes. We were serving them up every day. Supply chains impacted us specifically on our electronics component. So our actuators are unique in their use of high voltage, low power, portable electronics. It's just a very niche electronic industry. And with that, for instance, we'll have lead times of six months, nine months, things like placing a third order before we even received the first order. So I think most folks in your audience are probably familiar with the electronic supply chain crunch right now. And so that's definitely impacted us. And then also the other one, I would say that's impacted us in terms of the COVID pandemic is we've had pretty few customer visits so far.
And I think compared to what we would have had, and for us, we make a technology that a lot of times we're encouraging people to touch and feel and integrate. And I think a lot of times in the past, we would have sent engineers to our customer site and helped them put them in or, and even maybe stay there for a week or two and kind of work together. And because we're hardware that just, you know, physical context, usually just part of the game and it's not anymore. And so it's a lot of shipping to them, they ship it back to you, you have an interview or a call. And so that's probably another way it's impacted us, which is unfortunate.
We see that opening up a little bit more, the customer visits both to and from are starting to uptick, but as a physical hardware device, I think that we would have done more of that in a different world.
Elisa Muñoz: And, last but not least. Do you have any advice for future engineers or people starting on these robotics paths?
Tim Morrissey: I always just say, take action as early as possible. Just sell early, sell often and communicate with everyone. Some really good advice I got from a founder that exited a large public company was just take every meeting until you just can't anymore. And it's really tempting to say, oh, I already know everything I need to do. Just want to go head down as a technical person. I get it. I wanted to do that too. And he said like, just like every meeting, no matter who it is, like talk to them. Right. And I've done that. I have stepped off of that a little bit only recently, but definitely for a solid two years, I just said yes to every single person that wants to talk to me no matter what.
And it's, it's really important because you don't know, you have some assumptions, some guesses of what your value is in the marketplace, but you have no idea. And so you've just got to hit into as many other people's thoughts and ideas, get that feedback and that will help shape things. So that'd be my other advice.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you so much, Timothy. Thank you so much for taking the time.
