These robots could cut delivery costs by 80% | Next Unicorns

**Alex** (0:00)
Hey, everybody, welcome back to TWiST. My name is Alex. Okay, rewind the clock back to the COVID era. There was a boom in warehouse hiring because we pulled forward quite a lot of e-commerce growth, effectively overnight. Now, today, we hear more about how e-commerce giants are adding automation to their fulfillment systems and really getting a lot of benefits from that, cost control, speed, efficiency. But what about the smaller sellers? Are they reaping the same rewards from automation? If they are dependent on existing third party logistics providers, maybe not. But there's one startup that wants to change that by bringing a fleet of robots and smart software to a warehouse near you. So please join me in welcoming to the show, it's Kevin Gibbon, the co-founder and CEO of Cytronic. Kevin, how are you?

**Kevin Gibbon** (0:40)
Great, glad to be back.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:42)
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**Alex** (1:18)
I'm so glad you're here. Now, we have spoken over the years. I covered a couple of your companies and it's one, lovely to see you again. Your hair is still in place. How dare you?

**Kevin Gibbon** (1:25)
It is, it is. I'm sorry.

**Alex** (1:28)
But why are you doing this again?
You built ship, you scaled it, didn't work out the way we wanted it to, then you built Airhouse, that you sold to a company last year, and here we are with Cytronic, you're taking another bite of this apple. Why is this itch not sated yet inside of you?

**Kevin Gibbon** (1:44)
I think that building a really great company, and it's just really hard, and I think every single time that I do it, I just learn something new, and then I just get interested in where it's kind of pulled me. So I started SHIP 13 years ago, something like that, and I was an eBay power seller, and it was just really hard, and it was a great consumer shipping service. It was not a great venture-backed business, learned a ton, and then took it to Airhouse, where I learned a lot about the warehousing aspect of things. And I was like, well, I don't actually want to have a bunch of like, we had our own warehouses and fleets of couriers at CHIP. I'm like, I don't want to deal with the people problem. Like, I'm just going to go just purely software. So Airhouse was a marketplace for 3PLs. So we would work with the 3PL. We could figure out which ones are good. And then we had to have a network across the US and then globally. And it worked really well.
And then I just kind of like, continued to fall into like, what is the big, like shipping and logistics is a huge, huge category, but like across the board, what is the biggest pain point? And really, it's cost. And then with, especially the e-commerce, it's speed. So if you can fundamentally change that in some way, you can, like, you can just build something that everybody's gonna want and use. And that's what I kind of like, figured out when we started Cytronic.

**Alex** (3:09)
Yeah, okay. But also, yes, you can make a good business out of it. There are some benefits to, I would say, the broader economy at the same time, because if you can help the smaller seller, the smaller DTC brand, dare I say even the mom and pop, have a fulfillment system that is competitive with what Amazon has built for itself, then they can better compete with the incumbents, yeah?

**Kevin Gibbon** (3:30)
Yes, yeah, totally. And we see that all the time. Like half our customers right now in Cytronic, they're TikTok sellers. They're the people that are just blowing up overnight. So it's really empowering those people, and then scaling with them.

**Alex** (3:43)
I think we all kind of like, looked down our nose a little bit at companies that are like big on selling on Instagram, like how much stuff in your house, dear listener and viewer, came from Instagram ads. So none of us can judge, and frankly, these are small businesses. We should support them. That brings us to what you're actually building with Cytronic. So I want to talk about the robots you have. There's a number of different robots you're bringing to these warehouses that are then essentially orchestrated through software. It's kind of IRL orchestration. Forget agents for a minute, everybody will talk about the real world today.