New York City is becoming a booming city for robot business, as companies are developing and using robots. Provide a massage, Installing shingles on the roofautomating medical testing and much more.
“New York benefits from being a global city … we have access to global capital clients in other cities,” said Jacob Hennessy, who runs the New York Robotics Network, a nonprofit that aims to make the city a hub robot innovation. “We’re seeing a lot of companies relocating to New York … but we’re trying to tell the story that you can start here.”
A good example is Opentrons, a Long Island City-based company that makes “robots for biologists.”
The firm, founded in Brooklyn in 2014, takes its name from the open-source technology and artificial intelligence it uses to program its electronics. A decade later, Opentrons has achieved a $1.8 billion valuation and attracted investors including Bill Gates and billionaire tech founder and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.
The company eliminates the manual labor involved in conducting experiments and testing lab samples, such as pipetting, giving scientists more time for higher-level work.
The price of the robot starts at $10,000. With the advent of AI tools like ChatGPT, researchers can write prompts for the robot in simple language using the Opentron AI software – such as requesting to run a Covid test – and the machine handles the rest.
Opentrons showed how useful this technology is during the pandemic, when the city asked for help conducting millions of COVID-19 tests.
In July 2020, Opentrons launched PRL (Pandemic Response Laboratory) using 40 Opentrons to help NYC Conduct Covid TestingCEO Jonathan Brennan-Baddell told The Post.
The automated approach was highly effective, efficient and economical: The tests were more than 99% accurate, people saw results in less than 24 hours, and automating the process saved taxpayers about $600 million. The machines performed more than 12 million tests and were the first machines to identify new strains of the virus, including the Omicron in New York City, Brennan-Baddell said.
But Opentrons is focused on global applications. One machine, roughly the size of an oven, is so portable it could be deployed in local classrooms and remote locations in Africa.
The Opentron robot has already been used – powered by a car battery – for on-the-spot investigation of disease outbreaks in African villages. All of this was made possible, in part, thanks to Bill Gates, who connected Brennan-Baddell to one of his charities.
“It can take several days to test samples at a main lab in a large city, so portable testing could be an important step toward delivering timely results,” Brennan-Baddell said.
It could also play an important role in developing new medicines and making expensive treatments such as gene therapy more affordable.
Gene therapy — which costs more than $3 million — is out of reach for most people because it involves scientists altering and then manufacturing DNA for an individual. Brennan-Baddell said Opentron's machines are working to bring the cost of this therapy down to $30,000. Likewise, he hopes to reduce the $1 billion and 15-year costs it typically takes for pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs.
Khosla has noted the importance of technology in healthcare: “Life sciences has one robot per 20 people, while Amazon's latest warehouses have 10 robots per person; that's Opentron's opportunity,” he told Forbes last year.
Still, Hennessy said, the challenge is for New York to develop an ecosystem the way Boston and Pittsburgh have done — with more university research, more incubators to help founders start companies, and more federal and state grants to spur innovation,
“When you look at New York City you see Broadway and Wall Street … but there's so much more,” Hennessy said. “Clothes, airplanes, thermoplastics — there's a history of manufacturing and we want to bring that back.”
He is focused on attracting new talent, such as Adagi Robotics, which has moved its headquarters to Manhattan after a stint at Y Combinator, the prestigious startup incubator in Silicon Valley.
Adaggi is creating a 911 emergency service for robots — literally, an emergency line that robots can contact when they get stuck or need help.
Meanwhile, robotics in New York City has diversified so much that companies like Escape are offering massage robots in high-end spas, while Renovate’s products are being used to install shingles on roofs.
Edagy co-founder Rosalie Shinkle told the Post that the company's goal is to help robotic companies repair their products. “It can take one to 15 years to make robots reliable. We want to help people extract as much value as possible right now.”,
It can be hard to differentiate between the glut of robotics companies in Boston and Silicon Valley — and living in New York is even more fun. Shinkle, who left Boston Dynamics in Massachusetts, and his co-founder Kathleen Brandes, who left Tesla in San Francisco, both told The Post they were set to move to New York to start Edagy.
“We have a group chat of 500 Y Combinator people…about 80 of them have moved to New York City,” Shinkle said.
This story is part of NYNext, a new editorial series that highlights New York City's innovation as well as leading personalities across a variety of industries.
