Fox Everyday

Tutor Intelligence raised $75M led by a16z to rent warehouse robots by the hour. When a robot gets stuck, a remote human "tutor" steps in, and every fix trains the fleet. I love this model. Useful now beats perfect someday. It's the same bet we make with GRID: specialized machines on real jobs, one technician watching a swarm, unit economics that a sub can actually buy. You don't wait for full autonomy to ship value. The robot that works today is the one that learns tomorrow!

The hardest hire in robotics right now is a senior autonomy engineer for an early-stage startup, and I don't think most people understand why. The pool is tiny. Almost everyone good came through Tesla, Nuro, Waymo, Cruise or Zoox. Those programs are now so big that nobody inside them covers the whole autonomy stack. We interviewed someone recently from one of the biggest programs, very smart, and they had spent years on a small part of perception inside a 20 person team. Behavior, sensor integration, planning, all of it was someone else's job. An early startup can't afford someone who only knows one slice. You need a person who can weave the whole stack together, and those people basically don't exist on the market. So we stopped looking for a unicorn. Our answer is really senior advisors, plus younger engineers from great universities in the US and abroad who still understand the whole system because they were taught it recently, all under a very experienced leader. Our CTO Lars has 100+ patents in robotics and autonomy and already took an agricultural robot to market out of a bootstrapped startup in Sweden. I got this straight from my bible, Elon's biography. He always bet on the smartest young people and grew them into experts. It worked for rockets, and I'm pretty sure it works for rebar.

Watching a factory ramp is always cool. I spent years on that problem at Tesla. Jobsites are not campuses. Mud, rebar mats, heat, layouts that change every week. Design follows the job. That's why GRID is a stainless rebar-tying machine, not a humanoid with a tool in its hand. R2-D2 would outwork C-3PO on every construction site I've ever seen.

We're not buying a robot from China and reflashing it with our logo. Every piece of our hardware is custom, made with our own suppliers, and yes, that's the hard way. It's also the only way to understand your machine well enough to fix it at 6am on a jobsite.