Editor’s Note: Robotics Business Review‘s coverage emphasizes innovation, including start-up companies (or ‘young’ companies). RBR “Start-Up Profiles” highlight individual start-up companies using a consistent, templated format that makes for quick, yet informed reading, that also simplifies comparative analysis.
PickNik Robotics – Company Profile
| City: | Boulder | State: |
Colorado |
| Country: | USA | # of Employees: | 20 |
| URL: | www.picknik.ai | Founded: | 2015 |
Founder – Dave Coleman (Co-Founder and CEO)
Funding Status – Picknik Robotics is self funded at this time.
PickNik Robotics offers a suite of software libraries to make robotic manipulation more capable, including open source and commercially licensed technologies.
PickNik Robotics – Offerings Profile
Primary Target Markets – Defense / Security, Healthcare / Medical, Logistics / Supply Chain
Technology / Product / Service(s) – PickNik Robotics offers a suite of software libraries to make robotic manipulation more capable, including open source and commercially licensed technologies.
- MoveIt – MoveIt is an easy-to-use open source robotics manipulation platform for developing
commercial applications, prototyping designs, and benchmarking algorithms. - MoveIt Studio – MoveIt Studio is a complex set of algorithms, network connectivity, and robotics software. MoveIt Studio is more advanced than existing drive-by-wire solutions on the market, instead leveraging the advanced autonomous motion planning and collision avoidance algorithms. This differentiation will address the missing link in this market: how to deal with limited and latent network connections when controlling robots from a distance.
Value Proposition – As robots move out of the carefully arranged factories and more into unstructured, collaborative environments, it becomes harder and harder to understand the system’s limitations and rigorously test every corner case. PickNik Robotics increases their customer’s confidence in selling or deploying robotics automation by providing a fall back mechanism that serves as a stop-gap while whatever root issue is addressed or software improved to their robotics system.
Demand Drivers – PickNik Robotics save their customers money by increasing the uptime of their system, which results in better cycle time, increased output, and/or happier customers. The company also enables robotic minimally viable products (MVPs) to be rolled out sooner, because the MoveIt Studio solution can be dropped in and enable a suite of instant functionality. On-demand, remote assistance from a call center affords all these benefits at a fraction of the price of keeping troubleshooters on-site at each location for low-frequency intervention.
PickNik Robotics has had commercial contracts with approximately 50 companies to date, and many collaborative partnerships in the open source community.
PickNik Robotics – Business Model(s) and Competition
Business Model – A ‘freemium’ (open source) model has already gained 1,000’s of non-paying users of PickNik Robotics’ MoveIt software. Many of these users are at leading robotics companies. PickNik Robotics current monetization strategy is selling engineering services and support. They have already begun selling software licenses as a premium upgrade. Some of the licenses are per-robot seat, non-recurring. Others are based on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) monthly subscription model.
Partners – PickNik Robotics has had commercial contracts with approximately 50 companies to date, and many collaborative partnerships in the open source community. Our partners include Amazon, Microsoft, Open Robotics, Intel, Hello Robot, Motive Mechatronics, and AppliedLogix.
Customers – AppliedLogix, Rapyuta Robotics, Tethers Unlimited, Realtime Robotics, Numurus, and Franka Emika. The company has additional customers which prefer to remain anonymous.
Competitive Landscape – Energid
PickNik Robotics – Recent News
- Monarch Tractor Expands Leadership Team With Dennis Muilenburg
- Colorado Advanced Industries Accelerator Program Awards PickNik Grant Funding
- Catch PickNik at the Democratize AI with Open Research Conference
- Robohub: Robotics Manipulation with MoveIt Podcast
- Robobusiness Talk: Future of Robotic Manipulation
- Dr. Mark Moll joins PickNik!
