New York City is becoming a boom city for the robot business, as companies develop robots and use them to provide massages. Installing roof shinglesautomation of medical testing, etc.
“New York benefits from being a global city, with access to global capital customers in other cities,” said Jacob Hennessy, who runs the New York Robotics Network, a nonprofit that aims to position New York as a global urban hub. Robot innovation. “A lot of companies are relocating to New York, but we're trying to tell the story that you can start here.”
Opentrons, a Long Island City-based company that develops “robots for biologists,” is a good example.
The company, named for the open-source technology and artificial intelligence it uses to program its electronic devices, was founded in Brooklyn in 2014. A decade later, Opentrons has a valuation of $1.8 billion, attracting investors such as Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla, the billionaire tech founder and venture capitalist.
The company eliminates manual tasks, such as pipetting, involved in conducting experiments and testing lab samples, freeing up scientists to focus on higher-level work.
Prices for the robots start at $10,000, and with the advent of AI tools like ChatGPT, researchers can now use Opentrons AI software to write instructions for the robot in plain language, such as requesting to run a COVID test, and let the machine do the rest.
Opentron demonstrated how useful its technology could be when the city asked for help conducting millions of COVID-19 tests during the pandemic.
Opentrons launched its Pandemic Response Lab (PRL) in July 2020 using 40 Opentrons to help New York City conduct COVID tests, CEO Jonathan Brennan Badal told The Post.
The automated approach was highly effective, efficient, and affordable: the tests were over 99% accurate, test results were available within 24 hours, and automating the process saved taxpayers about $600 million. The machine ultimately processed more than 12 million tests and was the first to identify new strains of the virus, including Omicron, in New York City, Brennan Badal added.
But Opentrons is focused on global application: a single oven-sized machine is portable and can be installed in local classrooms or remote areas of Africa.
Opentron's robots, powered simply by a car battery, are already being used to test for disease outbreaks in African villages, thanks in part to Bill Gates, who introduced Brennan Badal to one of his charities.
“Testing samples at major laboratories in major cities can take several days, so portable tests could be a game changer in providing timely results,” Brennan Badal said.
It could also make a big difference in developing new medicines and making expensive treatments, such as gene therapies, more affordable.
Gene therapy costs more than $3 million and is out of reach for most people because it requires scientists to modify an individual's DNA to manufacture a new strain of DNA. Brennan Badal said the OpenTrons machine aims to bring the cost of the treatment down to $30,000. Similarly, he hopes to cut the $1 billion and 15 years it typically takes pharmaceutical companies to develop a new drug.
Khosla pointed to the technology's importance in healthcare, telling Forbes last year, “In life sciences, there's one robot for every 20 people, but in Amazon's newest warehouses, there are 10 robots for every person. That's Opentrons' opportunity.”
Still, Hennessy added that the challenge is for New York to develop an ecosystem like Boston and Pittsburgh's: more university research, more incubators to help founders get their companies off the ground, and more federal and state grant funding to encourage innovation..
“When you look at New York City, you see Broadway and Wall Street, but there's more to it than that,” Hennessy says. “There's a history of manufacturing — clothing, airplanes, thermoplastics — and we want to bring that back.”
He's focused on attracting new talent, such as Adazi Robotics, which moved its headquarters to Manhattan after working at Y Combinator, the prestigious Silicon Valley startup incubator.
Adagy is developing a 911 emergency service for robots – literally an emergency line that robots can contact when they're in trouble or need help.
Meanwhile, robotics in New York City is more diverse, with companies like Aescape providing massage robots in luxury spas and Renovate's products being used to install shingles on roofs.
“We're the first line of defense,” Addergy co-founder Rosalie Shinkle told The Post about her company's vision of helping robotics companies repair their products. “It can take one to 15 years for a robot to be reliable. We want to help people get as much value out of it as possible now.”“
It's hard to differentiate yourself from the sea of robotics companies in Boston and Silicon Valley, and it's a lot more fun to be in New York. Shinkle, who left Boston Dynamics in Massachusetts, and co-founder Kathleen Brandes, who left Tesla in San Francisco, told The Washington Post they were determined to move to New York and start Addergy.
“We have a group chat of 500 people from Y Combinator. About 80 of them moved to New York,” Shinkle said.
This story is part of “NYNext,” a new editorial series showcasing innovations and those leading the way across industries in New York City.
