The Story Behind My Investment In Cobalt Robotics

Earlier this week, Cobalt Robotics came out of stealth mode. The idea behind Cobalt is to create security robots which patrol places of work, like financial institutions, hospitals, data centers, operational plants, and other secure infrastructure. What is today typically done by a mix of humans (security guards) and machines (networked video surveillance) is up for reinvention in the eyes of Cobalt’s founders, Travis and Erik. Within a few minutes of meeting them, I committed to investing on the spot.

The progress Cobalt has made from the time I met them (over a year ago) to today is fantastic. I am not the only one to think so. This week, they were able to earn coverage (the real way) from an eclectic array of respected outlets such as MIT Technology Review; TechCrunch; IEEE Spectrum; Slashgear; and Architectural Digest.

Credit to Jake Gibson, who sent me the details on the company one week, and to my friends at Bloomberg BETA who pushed for me and led the deal. I immediately reached out to Travis, set up a meeting within 48 hours, and was (I think) able to be his last meeting on that Friday afternoon, 3pm start time, I think. As the meeting unfolded, and I knew I wanted to invest, I had to figure out if I could get into the deal, and how. I made a few calls that evening, and then sent a note to Travis and Erik that I’d like to be involved. But, I had only just met them, and we didn’t have time to bond or even talk about how I like to work, and so forth.

So, I resorted to another tactic — one of many examples that demonstrate how much portfolio founders end up helping their investors on other investment opportunities. By the time I met Travis and Erik at Cobalt, I had already made a small handful of hardware+SaaS investments, so I pinged all of those founders on a Friday night and begged them to write to Travis and Erik about their experiences with me. In a few days, I got a note from Travis to cease those operations. I was in.

Since then, it’s been easy to work with Erik and Travis. With their backgrounds from SpaceX and GoogleX, they largely wanted to dive into a hole to do their thing, to get lost in the development of this robot. Credit to them, as well, for being hyper-aggressive about building a customer pipeline and rifling through my contacts for it; as well as wanting to understands the hurdles they’d need to clear before interacting with the large funds for an bigger round. Travis called me about this so many months in advance, I was dumbfounded and wished more would do the same.

Now out of stealth and in the market, more challenges lay ahead for Cobalt — more competition, more of a fight to win customers, and more of a battle to bring companies to their vision of the future of security. I am fortunate to get a chance to learn from Travis and Erik, and to become friends with them as well.