Inside Matic's Office: Where the Viral Home Robot Gets Made

Speaker 0:01 [instrumental music]

Speaker 0:04 And all of them are running like continuously.

Speaker 0:06 Does this hurt the robot?

Speaker 0:08 Oh, yeah. The whole point is to hurt the robot to its extreme.

Mehul Nariyawala 0:10 [upbeat music]

Mehul Nariyawala 0:32 Hey, everyone. My name is Mehul. I'm a co-founder at Matic Robots. This is our production facility in Mountain View, California, that no one has ever seen before, and I'm super excited to show it to you guys. Let's go. Oh. Hey, Matic. Follow me. We build intuitive home robots for families. Our first product is a floor cleaning robot that actually

Mehul Nariyawala 1:02 is intelligent. A startup is like a ticking time bomb. The day you run out of money, that bomb goes off. We decided that, hey, we're not gonna worry about the aesthetic of the office. A lot of furniture in the office is a completely mismatch, 'cause we literally scavenged everything on Facebook Marketplace. What you see behind me here is one, bunch of our early prototypes. The first two ones are something no mechanical engineer would lay claim to.

Speaker 1:28 We were kind of the first ones that were involved in building those very first prototypes from the start.

Speaker 1:34 I came in about six years ago.

Speaker 1:36 I joined in January of 2020, uh, when it was the two of us, basically. We had this entire, like half of the office to ourselves. We had, like, four workbenches and all this empty space. I think sometimes we'd even, like, skateboard around to go get parts off the shelves or whatever it might be, and we'd pretty much just spend our entire day just doing everything you can imagine from scratch. So, like, hours on hours on hours of, like, cutting wires, crimping them, stripping them, 3D printing parts.

Mehul Nariyawala 1:59 Hardware is hard. That's the cliche. We filtered for people who wanted to build a product. The second thing we also tested for is that, are they long-term thinker? We decided to do six years vesting instead of typical four years, because building something great takes time. Right behind me is the production line. This is where the magic happens. It's a brand new assembly line

Mehul Nariyawala 2:29 that we've set up just over the last two weeks, uh, to help us scale from producing 100 robots a day to about 1,000 robots a day. And then behind me, some of the robots that are in various state of being built. So you'll see that they all have, uh, five different dots in front of it, and some of those dots indicate which tests are done and which aren't. This is our newest design for the noise calibration and noise testing chamber. It used to be an entire room. Now it's just a small device. These are all the robots that have passed all five tests.

Speaker 3:01 Every single Matic that has ever been shipped has been shipped out of this facility, and it's kind of a cool thing that I'm proud about.

Mehul Nariyawala 3:08 This is customer feedback wall of love. If you had come about a year ago and talked to our team, most people would've said is, that our robot is not that good. On every given day, as you're building the robot, all you're doing is looking at the issues and bugs and doing beta testing. We knew that a lot of customers were loving it, so I started printing them out, and then it just became a tradition. Every employee on day one when they join, they receive a Matic. If you cannot enjoy your own product, how are you gonna pour your heart into it?

Speaker 3:37 We, we named ours Steve, and then you named yours something crazier.

Speaker 3:39 Oh, Chad Worthington.

Speaker 3:40 Chad Worthington. [laughs]

Speaker 3:44 Yeah, so I made the movie posters. It was kind of the start of production picking up. I think it was bare walls, and I said, "I think I need a little bit more us." And on the weekend, I started messing around with different posters. That's kinda how they came around.

Mehul Nariyawala 3:59 Thank you for checking out the production facility. Now it's time to see the R&D space, so follow me. This is our R&D lab. This is where all the hardware engineers, designers actually test every single part and every single component. We wanted to bring onboard builders, and builders in general love to get their hands dirty.

Speaker 4:28 We had to ship a pet poop detection model.

Speaker 4:30 So there was a lot of, uh, you know, late night-

Speaker 4:33 Yeah, it was [laughs] it was a grind. What we did is we actually went to a dog shelter. We're like, "Okay, we need to come to your shelter and collect dog poop data. When do your dogs all go potty?" 6:00 AM on the dot, we're there, and we're shoveling poop [laughs] and putting it in front of the robot, and we're actually just recording the entire thing, and that's kind of why we have a pet poop model today.

Mehul Nariyawala 4:54 If you go around in this new office, you will see that every single room name has been labeled using Post-it notes, because we needed to move fast. When we moved here, all these desk and R&D spaces were built by all of us. So we have this ritual that we actually try to build as much of the components and the furniture and designs ourselves as possible.

Speaker 5:14 And when I joined the first day, my first task was, was building up my desk before I could get started. And so yeah, built the desk and, and I think that's carried through all the work that we do.

Mehul Nariyawala 5:30 Thanks everyone for joining today for Matic's tour. It was pleasure showing you our factory and our R&D lab, and now we're gonna get back to work of building the robots. Thank you. [wind blowing]