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“It’s a little bit of a messy story,” Adam Leeb says with a laugh. The story that landed Astrohaus in Detroit on two separate occasions is a bit tangled, certainly. The hardwre startup’s cofounder and CEO isn’t the sort of hometown cheerleader you often encounter when speaking with executives who’ve opted to keep their organizations outside cities like San Francisco or New York.
Hailing from Detroit’s outer suburbs, Leeb cofounded the company in the Motor City in Fall 2014 with Patrick Paul. Astrohaus’s first – and best known – product was born as an attempt to offer users a “distraction-free writing experience.”
“I’m not even a writer,” Leeb says of the product’s inception. “What interests me about the product – what got me going – is yes, it’s about writing, but common among all of the things I’m interested in, is it’s more about process and productivity. That’s something I’m super passionate about. And making things easier that get out of your way and are really fun to use.”
Leeb, an MIT mechanical engineering graduate and Philips, a Michigan State graduate and software developer met through the Detroit startup community and got to work prototyping a word processing device that delivered the benefits of modern, without the sort of inherent distractions of computers and tablets that today’s writers know all too well.
The young company introduced itself to the world by way of Kickstarter, launching a campaign in 2014.
“The Hemingwrite combines the best features of all previous writing tools with the addition of modern technology,” the company wrote. “It is dedicated like a typewriter, has a better keyboard and battery life than your computer and is distraction free like a word processor. Finally, we sync your documents to the cloud in real-time so you never have to worry about saving, syncing or backing up your work.”
The product was greeted with excitement and some gentle-ribbing (and some not-so-gentle, including one review that called it “pretentious hipster nonsense”) over a $500 reinvention of the typewriter. The crowfunding community went wild, with nearly $350,000 raised. In June of 2015, the product was renamed.
“We are updating our brand with a more demonstrative name that also no longer ties us to the persona of a certain famous writer,” the company wrote in a June 2015 Kickstarter updated. Two months later, Astrohaus relocated to New York City.
“I was really itching to leave. I didn’t know how we were going to make it in Detroit,” Leeb says. “There’s not really a hardware scene and my connections were mostly in New York. I pushed Patrick – we had raised some money and gotten going, so I was like, ‘let’s move to New York.’ There’s definitely more of a hardware scene and we were definitely a part of it.”
Once again, life intervened. Philips left the company and Leeb married Kacee Must, a Detroit resident – and owner of local yoga chain, Citizen Yoga. In 2018, he found himself building Astrohaus up again in the city where it started life. Three years later, the team is still a fairly lean one, with five full time employees in Detroit and a more distributed team of contractors.
Leeb’s feelings about launching a hardware startup in Detroit are clearly mixed. He bemoans the difficult it recruiting and finding funding locally, while acknowledging a sense of local cheerleading one really finds in larger cities. “With these smaller ecosystems, you really get to know people everywhere,” he says. “Everyone is so accessible. As far as anywhere I’ve ever been, Detroit companies really cheer or each other. There’s so much Detroit pride.”
For all of the talk of returning manufacturing to Detroit, Leeb says he’s had little luck in his pursuit to get the Freewrite and subsequent products created in the U.S.
“There’s a whole other world of advanced manufacturing startups that definitely get a lot of benefits from being in a manufacturing hub,” he says. “I think for software companies and for us it’s not so beneficial. We make our goods in China, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I have good relationships with our factories and I spend a lot of time in China. That’s what they’re geared toward. They make consumer electronics.”
Image Credits: Darrell Etherington
Leeb says he’s found the Andrew Yang-founded Venture for America nonprofit a useful source of hiring locally. In the years following Astrohaus’ launch, impressions of the city have changed radically from a depressed byproduct of rust belt boom and bust to a viable place to launch a business.
“The last 10 years, there’s a massive difference in the city,” Leeb says. “[Quicken Loans cofounder] Dan Gilbert almost single-handedly brought the city back. There are a lot of people who hate him, but the reality is that, while he wasn’t the billionaire in town, he’s the only one who heavily invested in Detroit. He consolidated all of his suburban offices and put them in downtown and he convinced all of these companies to do the same.”
The Covid-19 pandemic will no doubt continue to have repercussions, as remote work becomes the norm for many or most tech outlets. Though hardware startups will always have a compelling reason to keep things in close quarters, as companies develop and test products. For his part, Leeb says Astrohaus’ next device aims to address concerns about remote collaboration.
“I’m very aggressively starting to work on a new hardware product that is a collaboration and communication too,” he says. “It was a problem before, and now it’s such a widespread problem that I feel we’re lacking in certain communication. There’s a lot to be done there. I don’t feel as connected as we could be, even with the technology we have.”
The details for Ant’s restructuring plan after its IPO was called off have arrived. Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba controlled by Jack Ma, will be restructuring as a financial holding company, China’s central bank said on Monday.
Ant, which provides online infrastructure for payments and other financial services, needs to “correct its anti-competitive practices” and “give consumers more options in payments methods,” the regulator said. It should also end its monopoly on user information.
More to come…
Starting this week, some Domino’s customers in Houston can have a pizza delivered without ever interacting with a human.
The pizza delivery giant said Monday it has partnered with autonomous delivery vehicle startup Nuro to allow select customers to have their pizzas dropped at their door via Nuro’s R2 robot.
“There is still so much for our brand to learn about the autonomous delivery space,” Dennis Maloney, Domino’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer said in a statement. “This program will allow us to better understand how customers respond to the deliveries, how they interact with the robot and how it affects store operations.”
On certain days and times, customers ordering from the Woodland Heights store on the Domino’s website can request R2, which uses radar, 360-degree cameras and thermal imaging to direct its movement. They’ll get texts to let them know where the robot is and what PIN they’ll need to access their pizza via the bot’s touchscreen.
Over the course of the pandemic, the contactless, autonomous food delivery industry has accelerated quickly, and Nuro is currently poised to become a leader in this space.
“Nuro’s mission is to better everyday life through robotics,” Dave Ferguson, Nuro co-founder and president, said in a statement. “We’re excited to introduce our autonomous delivery bots to a select set of Domino’s customers in Houston. We can’t wait to see what they think.”
This is the first time meals will be delivered by an electric, self-driving, occupant-less vehicle on the roads in Houston. Woodland Heights, which is mainly residential, is one of the oldest historic neighborhoods in Houston, flanked by the I-45 and I-10 highways. The Domino’s there is right on Houston Avenue, a main thoroughfare, making this a substantially challenging space in which to pilot this technology.
Nuro originally announced the Domino’s partnership and began testing in Houston in 2019. That same year, the company began deploying its vehicles to transport Kroger groceries in Houston and Phoenix. At the end of 2020, it was approved to begin testing on public roads in California, delivering goods from partners like Walmart and CVS. Nuro is the first company to be granted regulatory approval by the U.S. Department of Transportation for a self-driving vehicle exemption.
Domino’s appears to be Nuro’s first large foray into restaurant delivery, but it certainly won’t be the last. The company just announced its $500 million Series C round, funded in part by Chipotle. Woven Capital, the investment arm of Toyota’s innovation-focused subsidiary Woven Planet, also invested, kicking off the fund’s portfolio.
Cruise has expanded its robotaxi ambitions beyond San Francisco. The autonomous vehicle subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, Microsoft and Honda, has struck a deal to launch a robotaxi service in Dubai in 2023.
The robotaxi service in Dubai will use the Cruise Origin, the all-electric shuttle-like vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and is designed to travel at highway speeds. The Origin, which was unveiled in January 2020 will be manufactured by GM.
Cruise will establish a new local Dubai-based company which will be responsible for the deployment, operation and maintenance of the fleet.
The service will start with a limited number of vehicles with plans to scale up to 4,000 vehicles by 2030 as part of Dubai’s self-driving transport strategy, according to Mattar Mohammed Al Tayer, the director-general and chairman of the board of the RTA. The robotaxis — and eventually the service — will be introduced gradually and limited to specific areas before expanding to other parts of the city.
Dubai’s Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed said the agreement with Cruise is a “major step towards realizing Dubai’s Self-Driving Transport Strategy aimed at converting 25% of total trips in Dubai into self-driving transport trips across different modes of transport by 2030.”
Importantly, Cruise has a lock on Dubai for at least a few years. Under the agreement, Cruise is the “exclusive provider” for self-driving taxis and ride-hailing services in Dubai until 2029. Al Tayer said the selection of Cruise was not taken lightly and involved a comprehensive, multi-year process.
