Andromeda Prepares to Scale Age Tech Robot, Abi

The last time we spoke, Grace Brown was exhausted. You wouldn’t know it from the clips. Managing a 12-hour time difference and running off fumes from a fresh $23 million AUD ($16M USD) raise, Andromeda’s founder brought her A game to one of the Automated podcast’s inaugural episodes.  

“I just remember being so exhausted,” she admits with a laugh. Brown is still navigating the endless parade of challenges facing an early-stage robotics founder (including an upcoming fundraising round), though a move halfway around the world has brought us significantly closer together in time zones. Andromeda’s September Series A fueled Brown’s movement from Melbourne to San Francisco, effectively, taking much of the company’s operations along in the process. 

“We've got a team of just under 10 people [in California], and will be hiring more throughout the year,” says Brown. “We're thinking a lot about how to do manufacturing in this next phase. There are a lot of questions there that are being discussed actively. My head of machine learning has moved over. We have engineers who kind of like rotate through a lot. My COO is here in San Francisco. My VP of product is here in San Francisco.” 

Prior to the move, Andromeda made strong inroads in Melbourne’s senior living community with the early version of its Abi robot. All told, the company has “dozens” of the colorful humanoid deployed in assisted living facilities, the majority of which are in Australia, where the company maintains a support staff.  Abi is also being manufactured Down Under, though that’s one of many aspects the startup is reassessing as it looks to scale production. 

Brown and Andromeda’s move to the U.S. is about more than just capital and access to Silicon Valley talent (though both strongly factor in). Living facilities in the States also represent a huge market opportunity for Abi.  

“We found that the U.S. age care market was very analogous to the Australian market, but the pain points were more significant,” says Brown. “So, while four out of 10 residents in Australia in an aged care home never received a visitor, that's about six out of 10 here in the States. Workforce turnover rates are higher here in the U.S. It's like they have the same problems but more exacerbated, and it was just a bigger opportunity for Abi.” 

Brown compares the state of existing Abi deployments to self-driving cars with a human overseer in the driver seat. The robot isn’t being teleoperated, but staff is monitoring use, in case intervention is required.  

““In terms of demand, everyone is in our inbox,” she says. “Everyone's trying to get her in their homes, get them in hospitals, get her in schools. Everyone wants them for their kids or their parents or their grandparents.” 

Growth for Andromeda means building a lot more Abis. The move would require key changes to the manufacturing processing, including swapping the startup’s longstanding process of 3D printing parts for more standardized injection molding.  Brown says Andromeda is looking to scale Abi’s “dozens” figure into the “thousands” over the next two years.