Developments in Physical AI, Plant Communication, and Open-Source Inference

It’s the moment everyone is waiting for — the ChatGPT moment for robotics, Amulya Vishwanath explained to TechCrunch’s Equity. She is the founder and managing partner of Techable Ventures, a VC firm focused on physical AI, which she started after spending nearly seven years as a product marketer at Nvidia. Before that, she held the same role at a company that was later bought by Intel and was a digital signal processing engineer at Interconnect Systems, which was later bought by the electronics manufacturer Molex. Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt. This view runs counter to those who believe that robotics, powered by a general foundation model, is about to have its “ChatGPT moment” — that day when the shockingly capable chatbot was launched in late 2022. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis caught up with Vishwanath to discuss where she’s writing first checks as the founder and managing partner of Techable VC. They also talked about what she’s learned as one of the first women executives to spin out of Nvidia and launch her own early-stage firm investing in physical AI across robotics, materials science, and life sciences. She stopped by Equity to talk about the future of physical AI — one of the industry’s latest buzzwords. “A lot of companies and experts have been talking about the ChatGPT moment for robotics,” she said, adding that right now the industry was more in a “LEGO era.” “There are a lot of foundational software and building blocks for robotics that are being rethought right now as we speak, and it’s super important in order for innovation to scale,” she continued. Right now, people are building the basics — the robotic hands or the actuators — that can one day come together and build that big-ticket-item, like a bunch of LEGOs coming together. There’s general- and special-purpose robots being built right now too, and eventually, as people continue building them, they will get better and more advanced. “We’ve done this during the internet era,” she said. “We’ve done this long, long time ago with the Industrial Revolution. I think it’s just a matter of time before things fall into place.” “Talent is also going to be very critical,” she continued, adding elsewhere in the convo that talent is still a key definer of the U.S. market. This is one of the “moats” of her firm, she said, helping connect founders to top talent so they can stay competitive right now, as so much talent is going to big companies like Anthropic and Nvidia. She pointed out that she’s built up a strong network to help founders from her years of working in this space. “This just makes it a lot more easier for me to be the strength or the first call for founders,” she said.