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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Live from the Compound. Humanoid robots are no longer science fiction. They're on factory floors right now, and the numbers suggest the next few years are when this goes from early adopters to everywhere. Global shipments of humanoid and quadriped robots grew 250% last year to nearly 53,000 units. Goldman Sachs projects more than 250,000 humanoid robots shipped by 2030 and a total addressable market of 38 billion by 2035, a number they have just revised up sixfold.
One investor saw all of this coming earlier than almost anyone else, bet his own money on it when the entire VC world told him not to, and then launched a publicly traded fund on the NASDAQ in May to let retail investors in on the trade. My guest is Andrew Kang. He is the CEO and co-founder of Robo Strategy, ticker Boot on NASDAQ, a veteran crypto investor who made some of the earliest bets in DeFi and then walked away from the whole thing to go all in on physical AI. Welcome to the show, Andrew. So happy to have you.
>> Hey Josh, thanks for having me.
>> How's that for a buildup? Pretty good.
>> Yeah, it's excellent.
>> All right. All right. Now, I understand you also battled Ant-Man in the quantum realm, or was that a different Kang?
>> I I believe that was a different one. There's also a different Kang from Micro Strategy itself if you're familiar.
>> Okay.
>> All right.
>> All right. Um in in 2017, let me set this up. In 2017, I wrote a blog post. Um, just own the damn robots and it sort of went like mini viral in the financial blogosphere, which is a thing that used to exist. Um, but I was explaining the relatively recent at that time NASDAQ explosion in terms of people realizing that these companies were on the verge of automating the entire economy and that investors worried about the future should just get longte. And after a decade in which the NASDAQ 100 is up about 500% since then, um, I'd say it was one of my better calls. You've taken that a step further. You have personally and professionally gone all in on robots. Tell us about the origin of your decision to want to do that.
>> Yeah. So, the origin of my decision was around around two or three years ago. Um, you know, a friend of mine showed me this company, Figure AI, and I took a look at the video and they were having robots walking around in a lab looking like humans, just like you see in the sci-fi movies. And it was like, well, before you would have thought that was kind of crazy, but now it was in the context of chat GBT having launched, I think a little bit less than a year ago. And it just kind of made sense that, okay, these things can probably actually start working now.
>> Um, it's always a pipe dream.
>> But, you know, the reason why we didn't have it work was because intelligence was always the gaining factor. And I think it was kind of a little bit more clear that intelligence development of it was really going to accelerate and that you could potentially solve general intelligence for robotics in a in a really reasonable amount of time. You know, not 50 years, not 100 years, but something more like three to five to seven years. And so that made really compelling time.
>> So figure AI had I guess prototypes of robots, but this sort of predates the rise of generative AI. it's before chat GPT or right around the same time and that for you that's the thing that unlocks it where you say okay I now think this is workable and investable.
>> Yeah, it was late 2023 you know like January 2024 or so and um so it was a little bit after CHPD came out.
>> Um, okay.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. Um, you've told the story elsewhere you you talked to a lot of other VCs. you went to your whole network and you were talking about figure and robotics and you say almost everybody told you not to invest um but then you put in a million bucks anyway then you raised that stake to 19 million. Walk us through that period of time. What do you think you saw that the rest of them didn't? And are you very happy to have not listened uh to to that advice given the the rise of robots as an investment theme you know within a couple of years later?
>> Yeah. Um, so just kind of like looking at the company figure and trying to understand the total market opportunity of it. It it was it was it was a new framework that you had to kind of have kind of had to develop because we never had humanoids before. And so there was an established market for this that you could look at. um completely new and and so like the way we kind of thought about it was well humanoids are essentially productizing you know physical labor in the same way that LLMs productize knowledge work you know digital intelligence and so you know if a robot can do anything that a human can do um and it's working 24/7 365 it never has to sleep it never gets tired never takes breaks or complains or quits the job right like
>> no health insurance
>> pretty good
>> no 401k Okay. Match, right?
>> Yeah. And like then so then your your market size is essentially the entire physical labor market which is something like $50 trillion. I know that's a really nebulous number. It's just kind of like a
>> really big thing. And so it's how much perspective
>> 50 trillion
>> 50 trillion is the annual value of physical labor in our economy,
>> right? It's all the people Yeah. I mean, that are you know, working you know, factory jobs or uh, you know, working in retail environments but it's also but it doesn't include all of the labor gaps that we have and all the economic value that could be provided by you know, all the jobs that exist but just can't be filled as well. And so the market could potentially be larger if we start bringing robots to space uh having them in other environments where it just doesn't make sense economically for them to you know, have people doing those jobs today.
>> You are different than a lot of people, myself included. I always think like, yeah, robots 50 years from now. Um, and you know, or a lot of people would say 20 years from now, but you're like a 3 to 5 years from now person. And I think that's where you stand out from other pe. I think conceptually we all understand there have been robots in factories for a long time. The big difference now is that they're humanoid robots. They almost they they don't just act as a coworker. they sort of there's a verse similitude with a real actual coworker, but you don't think that takes 20 or 50 years. You think that's like right this minute? Um, what what makes you confident that that will be the case? And where do you think our audience will look around and see robots next to them the soonest?
>> Yeah, look, I I think in 2020 I I probably would have been on the same page and thought that this was something that was more of a moonshot and, you know, wasn't sure if this would be achieved in our lifetime. But with when CH GPT came out, I I think it was pretty apparent that the slope of technological process was changing quite dramatically and things would be getting better much much faster. And so we saw that jump from GPT3 to GPT 5.5 5.6 six right in the last three to four years and that was a huge jump. I mean, these right machine intelligences are doing things that are sometimes things that we can't even do ourselves. Uh right, the intelligence levels have just skyrocketed and so I think you can just easily extrapolate to that similar path of development happening for physical AI as well for the intelligence of robots.
>> You have a you you have a lot of um you you have a lot of contacts in the space and you've seen a lot more than the average person who's listening or watching us right now. I think like speaking as the voice of the average person, everyone's been sent the YouTube video of the dog with no head, which is very disconcerting. Um, everybody remembers when Elon Musk brought one of his humanoid robots to the Kardashian mansion, um, to, I guess, serve drinks at a party. And then the thing that they say is like, "All right, the dog looks like a toy. Um, and the Elon Musk stunt with the robot, there was actually a person controlling the robot behind the scenes." like I still feel that people don't really believe that this exists or or that they're going to run into one of these. So, just to like double double down on my original question, where would you tell uh regular people that they're going to come into contact with these humanoids first?
>> Yeah. I mean, in regular contact, I would say it's probably a few years out from now. Uh, but I think you're going to see it more so on the internet or if you live in specific places like Silicon Valley a lot sooner. Um, I don't know if you saw the figure AI live stream uh was around one or two months ago that went pretty viral where they had a humanoid robot doing, you know, logistics task uh sorting packages, flipping them over like the same way a human would.
>> And it went out went on for eight days straight. And I think that was like a little bit of a mini chat moment where people started to realize this is real. It wasn't controlled by a human and right it didn't need to it wasn't some clip that was chosen out of a hundred clips or 100 takes right and that was the one that was posted on the internet but right it was working autonomously for a long time.
>> Wait, the robot was sort I've seen that clip but I watched 30 seconds of it I didn't watch eight days of it but the the robot spent over a week at that task I guess.
>> Yeah, they had a few they had a few robots changing shifts because each robot after you know, I don't eight 10 hours they had to go and charge their right batteries and there was another robot that came and swapped over.
>> I was going to say they had to go call their wives or or pick up their kids at karate or something but all right so they have to swap the batteries but all things all things being equal that's what we're going to see in that package sorting role for example in like a factory setting or a warehouse setting.
>> Yeah, package sorting, machine tending, uh packaging uh items, I mean all all sorts of things. It's it's it's kind of hard to kind of list off everything that a robot could do in these factories because it's just, you know, almost everything a human can do, but also more, right? Because some tasks are just too dangerous or, you know, they require too much intensity or strain from a human.
>> That's where a robot can do a really great job.
>> You've done the math on this publicly. You said a robot doing the work of three humans at roughly $2 an hour versus $35 to $40 for a US worker. um at that math the economic incentive for adoption becomes almost impossible to ignore. So I guess the only real holdup is how fast can you manufacture robots and how quickly can you can you convince business leaders to insert these machines in their in their uh work environments? Like what what else really is there that that would hold this up?
>> Yeah, I would say intelligent. Sorry. I mean, I would say the manufacturing is the main bottleneck. The intelligence is going to get there in the next one or two years. If you kind of like take a look inside the research labs or some of these uh headquarters of human motor companies, it's it's kind of magical in terms of like what they what they're able to do. Um, but you know, we can only produce so many robots per year right now. And to produce say a factory that can manufacture a million or 10 million robots per year, that'll take, you know, a little bit of time to get going. So that'll be the bottle, but we're going to solve it in the next, I would say, three, four years.
>> So we're going to get into some of the investments that you're making today. Um, but just conceptually, is it likely that Tesla will be at least in the early stages of this, the first company who actually has the wherewithal to manufacture humanoid robots at some sort of scale? Do they look like they're in the pole position from a manufacturing standpoint?
>> 100%. I think they're working on a 10 million robot per year facility right now, which would be the
>> the biggest one by far.
>> Uh, most companies are producing on the scale of thousands to tens of thousands of robots per year today.
>> So, it's a gigantic.
>> Um, Andrew, you've been very honest about what you think comes next for workers, maybe more so than a lot of other people building in this space and a lot of thought leaders in Silicon Valley. Um, you think that or you've said AI and robotics will eventually replace both physical and cognitive labor and that perhaps universal basic income or UBI becomes a necessity. Most executives um in the space again they're not saying that out loud. I would imagine maybe they're saying it over drinks with uh with their colleagues, but um, you seem to lead with it. So talk about why that component of it is really important for us to be honest about.
>> Yeah. Well, I mean, you can't fight technology. Anyone that's tried to fight it in the past, they've always lost. Um, and and and so I think you got to start planning ahead of time for when that reality hits and people are displaced by by this technology. Um, and, you know, we can't do it two years, three years in in the future because people might be out of jobs at that point. So we need to start working on a plan now um for when that moment does come because when it h comes it's going to happen real fast and you don't want to react late and you know, people could be a lot in a lot of trouble if you are reacting late.
>> The techno optimists seem to think that there's going to be a boom in jobs we never could have conceived of before happening in the wake of this robotics revolution. I don't know if that means robot repair. I'm not a thousand% sure what what that means, but I I guess there are a lot of people working in jobs today that we couldn't have imagined 20 years ago, like social media manager. So, um, talk a little bit about I guess why you're hopeful that we're not talking about UBI being the way everyone gets paid, maybe just a subset of workers who are the the first among the displaced while they try to figure out what they're going to do next. Or is it more bleak than that?
>> Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's going to be some jobs that uh people will move into that people don't want robots doing um service related jobs where you want a human touch for example and uh, you know, maybe that gives a higher level of service if you have a human doing that for you as opposed to a robot for example in China uh they have the food delivery robots in a lot of the hotels but they don't have them in the fivestar hotels the best hotels right because it kind of adds a little bit of like a less premium service.
>> But at the same time like what if you get androids, right? What if you have robots that are almost indistinguishable from humans and provide even a better level of service? Then well, that's maybe pretty tough to to deal with. I think the argument goes like this for the maybe the some of the technology people, which is we've always found like new jobs for people, but the reason why we found new jobs is because we found jobs to do that required more planning or like con like complex cognitive thinking in some way. And like intelligence is AI is not going to stop. it's going to be able to think in all the ways that humans can. And so I don't see that being right like a good extrapolation to the future. Um, and yeah, I'll just I'll just leave it at that.
>> Like I >> robots. You think so you think these previous technological waves where within a couple of years somebody that used to be a blacksmith or somebody that used to um manage a horse farm then we get the automobile those people maybe become automobile mechanics like that that analogy may not hold true this time because of the thinking that AI is capable of doing and that's the thing that prior waves of technological advance just it they didn't have as a as a feature as a feature.
>> That's a great way to look at it cuz you mentioned robot repair mechanic. Why couldn't a robot do that? You're going to have robots building robots.
>> Stop. You're take you're taking all the good robot repair jobs. Stop. All right. I mean, look, it's a serious subject. We're laughing about it. Um, but it would you say like on the uh spectrum of uh optimism versus pessimism about what this is going to mean for the average person, would you say you're leaning more toward pessimism or are you just neutral? Um, because it doesn't sound like you're in the 8 n 10 level of the optimists who say this is going to be incredible because think of all the new industries we're going to create. It doesn't sound like you're you're you're on that side of the the spectrum of of thought on this.
>> Yeah. Well, I think if we get like figure out the AI safety AI alignment piece, then there could be some pretty good outcomes for humanity. uh, you know, Elon talks about embodans for everybody because, you know, labor is just going to be so cheap and we're going to be able to do so much as society and if we write the right frameworks for letting that benefit all the economic value benefit people of, you know, all classes, then I think we could have a great outcome. Um, but we got to get that right. Right.
>> I I agree. What would you do if you had the power to enact some sort of plan or program at a national level? What would you do today or what would you start talking about today so that people are asking the right questions and looking for the right answers to those questions?
>> Well, I think there needs to be more research done and studies and I think there's been some already around UBI and what happens to society once you start, you know, giving out essentially like government support paychecks to to everyone. Um, you know, there are some societies that have done it in in Europe and it's worked out well for them, but you know, there have been some implementations that haven't worked out so well. But it's it's also you don't really have a choice. Um, because if there are no jobs for people then what what else are you going to be able to do? Um, you know, Sam Alman I think talks about universal basic intelligence. Um, but I'm not sure like that's a little bit harder to translate because I'm not sure anyone will just be able to turn intelligence into food and, you know, housing for themselves as well.
>> Um, so you probably got to provide that for a lot of people. So one of the models that I I guess would be deemed successful is in the Nordic countries where they've taken the oil wealth of the nation and they've created sort of this prosperity fund that manages that oil wealth and every citizen effectively gets a dividend from that. And, you know, it's it's sort of how they've been able to make it so they don't have one or two really rich people um who who have captured all of that oil wealth and everybody else in the country just looks at it. It's like, "Oh, that must be nice for them." So, it's sort of an example. I mean, it goes into like socialism and areas that you and I aren't going to go into today. Um, but do you think do you think that might be some sort of a model where the government is involved in robot investments and is able to capture some of that uh shared prosperity and make sure that it's being sort of universally um applied or or is that more problematic than it is a solution?
>> It seems like the government's kind of going that direction already, right? They've um, you know, invested in semiconductor companies in the US like Intel. They provided financing for the rare earths uh processing companies and I think it's pretty clear that robotics is next. They've, you know, let's been on TV over and over saying about how important robotics is for the country. Um, and, you know, we've been a little bit behind on it compared to other countries in terms of incentivizing the domestic industry, but it now it is a major priority for the government and you're seeing that with the conversations that are going on with some of the bills that are going through Congress and the Senate right now. And so, yeah, I absolutely think that um, you know, having government investment in the industry is is is important.
>> I want to talk about the structure of what you built because this is where it gets really interesting for our audience. So, you've got a vehicle, which you'll describe to us, that went public on NASDAQ um in May. So, it still has that new fund smell. Um, the ticker is BOT, bot, and it's a closedend fund as opposed to an ETF or a venture capital fund. It's it's something a little bit different. Can you explain what Robo Strategy actually is, why you structured it this way?
>> Yeah, Robo Strategy is essentially a publicly listed venture capital company. It is exclusively focused on investing in leading robotics companies and predominantly private robotics companies. Um, and really the concept is we're really bullish on the industry. We think it's going to grow 100fold, a thousandfold. Um, we're going to bring humanoids, right, to the market. We're going to invent all these new applications that can be done by robots. But all that exciting innovation is happening in the private sector. Um, and you saw this with the AI lab,
>> the private markets, the private away from away from this. A lot of it's not on the the stock market. So, you're giving people away to own stakes in the private companies that you identify as being worth investing in.
>> That's right. Yep. Exactly.
>> Okay. Um, the micro strategy comparison is something that you've leaned into publicly. The idea is that, and if I have any of this wrong, just correct me. You issue shares at a premium to NAV. You use the proceeds to buy more equity in robotics companies. And it sort of sounds like the flywheel that uh Michael Sailor first proposed when he began to use Micro Strategy as a way to do that with Bitcoin. Um Strategy's NAV is a live Bitcoin price effectively like how I think he owns uh was it 850,000 Bitcoin or or something like that. And so the the price of the security is a function of where is the price of bitcoin and how how many bitcoins does strategy own. So it's it's sort of easy to understand by people and then it'll trade at a premium or a discount to to that amount of bitcoins. Um, your private company valuations are estimated quarterly and that's what gives investors a fundamental view into what bot could or should be worth at any given time. Do I have that right?
>> Yeah. So, we're we're actually going to probably start updating it monthly on our website. Um, I think there's a lot of nuance in understanding NAV because uh, it's very different from the NAV of a fund that holds publicly traded assets where those assets are pretty much marked to market every second or every minute for something like Bitcoin. For us, right, these private assets are marked at the last round valuation or sometimes at at a discount. And and so what that doesn't take into account is all the changes in the company, right, between rounds. And like a public company that valuation or the growth of the company uh is being reflected pretty much every single day.
>> Every se every second right.
>> That's not reflected in in the NAV and so right but if there's a positive development or a negative development it's not reflected until the next round and that could be six months out a year out two years out uh and that's part of the reason why you might see differences from the company right strategy trading at a premium or at a discount and maybe to kind of reflect reflect some of that development that might occur between rounds. Um, and there's so and and and I think you you should also understand that private markets and public markets value assets differently because there's there are two mark there are two different markets and they have a different subset of market participants. And you see this happen all the time. More private companies when they go public, some of them might be valued more highly when they go public because there are more buyers there. There's more demand in in the public markets than there are the private markets, right? Which is really like a small subset of the total investors in the entire world where the public markets are a subset of almost every investor in in in the world. And um, and you see this in in some public companies where their whole strategy is based on rolling up private companies into their balance sheet. Companies like Transdime or Constellation Software where the public companies um, you know, the public markets mark them at something like a 15 to 40x earnings multiple and their whole strategy is buying companies in the private markets that are valued at maybe 3 to 8x that do very similar things. And so they can spend 100 million and as soon as that's on their balance sheet now it's 400 million right they've created 300 million.
>> It's an arbitrage they they do that in my industry the larger the larger registered investment advisory firms have sort of like an enterprise multiple.
>> And so when they go and buy a mom and pop RAIA that's immediately like it immediately adds to the value of the enterprise at like 3 to 4x just by virtue of this is now no longer a standalone business doing 7 million in revenue. We're adding this 7 million in revenue to us and therefore the multiple on that revenue is higher because our multiple is higher. This is a very common thing. So you're doing that in a in a market where um there's less price discovery. There are less investors total. It's sort of like um in an enclave, you know, primarily in Silicon Valley or in Asia. And as a result, there's some sort of I don't want to call it alchemy, but there's some sort of arbitrage where once these companies become part of your fund, all of a sudden there could be an uptick in what they're worth.
>> Yeah. And in private equity world, right, they call it uh multiples arbitrage. There's a bunch of terms for it, and we're just applying to venture capital, which is, I think, the first time people have done it in in in the public equity markets.
>> Okay. Um, could you update the value of the company, the private companies you're invested in based on shares changing hands amongst private shareholders? For example, you invest in a robotics company and an employee manages to sell some of his or her stock to a venture capital fund or through one of these uh platforms and then that the value is different from the last round. Are you able as the manager of the fund to take that into account in how you value these startups or is that an area where you don't want to go you'll just wait for the next financing round to to write the value up or down?
>> Yeah, right now it's a small component of our valuation framework.
>> Um, could be a larger component over time. Uh, what I would also note is that the secondary markets for venture are are pretty funny and that they don't act like the public secondary markets. It also anchor to, you know, the most recent rounds because people say, "Hey, look, they just did this round six months ago. I want money that way." Yeah. And then it jumps, right? Like whenever there's a new round, that happens. That's a little bit of alpha actually, you know.
>> Um, I don't I don't think that the the the markets are entirely uh correctly priced a lot a lot of the times uh in the secondary markets.
>> Well, it's hard like take um take for example Anthropic. Uh, so let's say they do a round and you know they're raising at a valuation of this is like years ago. They raise at a $50 billion valuation and then news comes out like 3 weeks later that they got this massive contract with the Pentagon.
>> Obviously the company's worth more.
>> But there's no ticker and no one's trading it. So the private market knows it's worth more, but until there's a new transaction, hard to say hard to say exactly how much more. And that's a really big difference between public market investments and private.
>> There's a lot of transactions in the secondary market, but the thing is that there's no like they're not publicly reported and and so there's a lot of nontransparency opakquakeness in terms of where these things should actually be priced and what people are buying and selling them at.
>> Okay. Okay. So, you're being very honest and open with your investors in the bot fund. Hey, the these valuations are going to change rapidly. We hope they'll change positively, but you know, they'll it'll be sudden and we won't know for sure. And I I feel like you're I read through some of your stuff. You're you're just saying like this is very different than public market investments and you should, you know, act accordingly.
>> Yeah. It's it's interesting. uh kind of navigating this NAV framework because it's, you know, of course we try to be conservative on it because, you know, we don't want to be overestimating our our our marks um, and the secondary markets can be intransparent and maybe a little bit slow uh at the same time, right? Like we want to be able to provide accurate values and I guess the public market is kind of doing that in a in a way by trading these things at at a at a premium um, I hope it's something that becomes more transparent over time. But the the NAV framework was just never made for this world where the valuations move so fast, right? It was most of the closing funds in the past have been private credit funds where right the changed quarter.
>> Or or they'll own municipal bonds or they'll own. Right. Okay. Um, your three largest positions are Figure AI, Aptronic, and Dino Robotics. Um, according to what I read, each represents a quarter of the fund's net assets. It's a pretty concentrated bet. Um, it seems like you want to own a lot of the best and not just sprinkle in a hundred different startups for the sake of saying you're diversified. Um, of course, what comes along with that is increased risk if something goes wrong with one of them. Tell us about those companies and um, what people need to know just like uh as far as like why you chose those specific investments.
>> Yeah. So, so one thing I would note is that the percentage allocations are going to change pretty significantly over time. Uh, the reason why, you know, they might be a little bit more concentrated was because when we started the fund around a year ago, right, there wasn't as many exciting companies in the space that were, you know, more mature than there are today. And that's changed quite a bit because the field is moving so fast. There's so much more talent going into the space and companies are maturing, right? Um, you know, quarter by quarter. And uh, you know, in terms of the companies that we've chosen, you know, we focus on companies that have just have the biggest power law potential impact, um, companies that have uh, you know, tackling the biggest markets in the world and still even at multi-billion dollar valuations have potential 100x upside. Uh, right, we want to bas basically find the anthropics or the open AIs of the robotics world and we also want to be selective because imagine if you invested in maybe a lower valuation like AI I company that you felt because you felt anthropic or OpenAI was too expensive and you were trying to catch up to them. I mean, you would have probably not done too well because most of them, right, they just kind of got out competed by these larger companies that had more talent, more resources, and just were better better leadership and and so that's kind of our approach where we just want to bet on the best and leading companies in the space because there is so much more upside available. You don't need to be picky and uh there's a lot of alpha in being able to to differentiate between, you know, the winners and and the losers because there are going to be a lot of failures in the robotic space.
>> Okay. So what's the elevator pitch on on figure AI?
>> I mean, they're I would think about them as like the apple for humanoids. Um, they have a
>> they have the best product.
>> Yeah. It's not just, you know, their chops in manufacturing AI and hardware, which I believe they're all top of the line for, but it's also the experience that they've been able to show with the robot with, you know, the videos that they've created. And, uh, you know, you walk into the figure office, it feels like you're walking into the future. Uh, there's, you know, hundreds of robots walking around doing household tasks or doing tasks in like a logistics environment. And, you know, it's like designed in a way where it's like this is a premium product. If I have people in my home, that's like that's something I would show off. I want to I wouldn't want to show off like a dinky, you know, $5,000 robot that is, you know, like breaking, you know, every six months or
>> What are they going to sell the first the the first model that's for sale to the public? What are they going to sell that for?
>> Uh, I think that's TBD.
>> Okay.
>> No,
>> but we're thinking it's six figures.
>> Uh,
>> or not necessarily.
>> It they might have a model that goes that high. I think they're probably going to try to make it more affordable. Uh, and I think the leasing uh, the leasing uh robot type of uh business model is going to be popular as well that a lot of these companies are exploring but that's more so to to industry rightosed for the home.
>> What's Apptronic?
>> Appronics uh they were one of the earliest humanoid companies. They've been around uh for, you know, nine ten years and they have uh what I consider some of the original innovators in actuator development. Actuators are basically the motors in the in the joints of the humanoid that basically allow them to move around. Uh, and, you know, that's one of the most important components of of a humanoid or any robot in general and they've partner.
>> So that's a bet on a supplier to the robot companies.
>> They're so they they make their own humanoids now. Before they were consulting service and they had actually produced the prototypes from for one of the very well-known humanoid companies today. Uh, but then they decided, hey, look, we're going to develop our own humanoids now. And so they developing their own hardware. They partnered with Jable to do the manufacturing. They partnered with Google deep mind to develop the AI.
>> Okay. Uh, and lastly, Dino Robotics. What's the bet there?
>> So Dina is a really unique case where a company like Figure, they're developing both the AI and they're also developing the hardware. Um, unlike I guess electronic is that they're doing it kind of entirely vertically within the company itself. But their robot doesn't have legs. you know, they're creating robots that are completely stationary. They're just two arms or they're on a wheelbase. And I think that's a really big market as well because not every single robot needs to move around to have legs and those add a lot of cost to the robot, right? Most tasks in a factory, you're just kind of stationary. You're doing the same job over and over and over again. It's repetitive and right, you you for a lot of environments as well, you don't need to go up and down stairs or, you know, go across tough terrain, right? You just need to be able to move around the same floor.
>> Yeah. Depending on what it depending on what its job is. Not every job requires like mobility on foot.
>> Yeah, exactly. That's what they're working on.
>> Okay, last question. Um, you just announced a $36.5 million private share issuance two days ago. Is this I guess it's not I want to ask you if it's dilutive but I'm not sure if that's the right terminology because it's a closedend fund and ostensibly you said you're deploying it like you're going to be making a uh an investment with that money so it's additive even to the existing shareholders of the fund but how I guess how should a shareholder in bot think about this uh share issuance and future share issuances as you find new opportunities that you want to invest in, you're going to need capital uh to do it. I think everyone understands that.
>> Yeah. So, we've announced three pipe fundraises over the course of the past three weeks uh totaling close to around 100 million.
>> Those were all done with institutional investors that we believe are very long-term oriented, not selling them into the public market. Um, and they were all done uh at multiples to the publicly stated NAV. Uh, I believe around 3 to 4x.
>> Um, and
>> So these people believe in what you're So these people believe in what you're building so much that they're paying a very high premium over the actual NAV that you're now reporting. So that's a sign of a lot of confidence.
>> It was it was uh close to the market price of each day that you know we had the pipes.
>> Yes.
>> Right. Okay. Of course, like we're not, you know, as the largest shareholders in the company, the management team is not going to want to do dilution or issue shares if we don't believe it's massively accreative, right? The value that we're getting from doing the issuance itself at a at a multiple plus the value of the investments that we're making and what we hope to generate from the returns has to outweigh the cost of dilution substantially for us to decision.
>> Okay. So if you're a shareholder in bot and you see an issuance, your attitude should not be, oh, I guess this dilutes the amount of exposure I thought I had to figure AI. The way that you should actually think about it is, okay, they must have identified some opportunities and they want to go after it and that'll be more investment in in this portfolio that I'm invested in.
>> Like that would be the that would be the way you want people. We're increasing the exposure to the companies that people see and want in the portfolio in the same way Micro Strategy did that for Bitcoin, right? They increased their Bitcoin per share. That's one of the key metrics they looked look at something between five to 10x from when they first started accumulating it in in 2020. And so, you know, hypothetically if we had one figure share per robo strategy share, we hope to increase that by multiples in future as much as we can so people can actually right have more exposure on a person.
>> Okay, that that's awesome. So, um, somebody that's thinking about investing in robot in, uh, robotics and they believe as I do and as you do that this is happening and, uh, you know, it's it's it's something that you can actually benefit from if you place your bets right. There are lots of publicly traded robotics ETFs and now what you have listed is something completely different because you're able to invest in pre-public robotics companies that have great products and ultimately at some point hopefully will themselves go public.
>> That's correct. Yeah. And, you know, these private companies stay private longer and longer. SpaceX IPOed at two trillion anthropic open AI not going public until at least a trillion. And that trend is going to keep going for these private companies because there's just so much capital going in into these markets. And it's it's a long process to go public. It was it's not difficult. You have to deal with public board and all these other things. And if they have the ability to stay private, most companies are going to choose to do so.
>> All right, Andrew, I really appreciate your time today from a uh let me just cover both of our asses. Nothing that you hear on this show is ever an endorsement or a recommendation to buy or sell any securities. Of course, uh, do your own research, use your own judgment. Um, if you want to read more about bot and read the risk factors and read about the company holdings, Andrew, what would be the best place for people to go?
>> Yeah, roboergr.co or on X. Robo Strategy.
>> Okay. RoboStrategy.co or follow Robo Strate Robo Strategy on X. Andrew, thanks so much for coming by. Can we come to you in the future as we see more robots and want to talk more?
>> Yeah, we we'll bring in robots in the studio next time, Josh. Thanks for having me.
>> I love I love it. Nice to see you. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you guys for watching and listening.
>> Take care.