Matician

matician.com

We are building robots that can learn from the environment by moving around and interacting with it. We believe in owning the full stack from the lowest levels of software to the actual hardware. We design and produce robots under one roof to accelerate our iteration cycle. Our integration starts all the way from the firmware to the electricial engineering to the actual assembly of the robot. Foundational to our mission is the ability for the robot to see the world in 3D using just regular cameras. We developed a neural network to see the world in depth using stereo cameras and a SLAM system to locate our robot in 3D space. We believe that the fastest and the most robust way to learn about the world is through interaction. When our robot encounters a novel object, it can move around to observe the object from different angles and viewpoints to acquire more data. Matician is led by repeat founders Navneet Dalal and Mehul Nariyawala. Navneet has a PhD in Computer Vision and is perhaps best known for his thesis, Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), a landmark in computer vision research, which remained the state-of-the-art for 10 years with over 35,000 citations. Navneet and Mehul were early employees at a startup called Like.com, which pioneered facial recognition in images in 2005 and was acquired by Google in 2010. Next, they started Flutter (Y Combinator W12), a startup that built on-device hand-gesture recognition. The algorithms worked locally on the device using the webcam with just an 800kB footprint. And yet, Flutter beat the state-of-the-art algorithms in accuracy and recall, leading to its acquisition by Google in 2013. At the time of acquisition, Flutter was the #1 Mac Store app in 73 countries and its users had performed over 77 million gestures. At Google, they helped launch Google Cardboard at Google Research. Later, the team moved over to Nest where Mehul was the Lead PM for Nest Cam and Navneet led the algorithms team. The team conceptualized and launched Nest Cam Outdoor, Nest Cam IQ, and Nest Hello Doorbell along with other computer vision features such as person and stranger detection. In 2017, Mehul and Navneet returned to the startup world, co-founding Matician. They have since grown the team to over 25, including Google, Tesla, and Cisco alumni, all working together to bring the vision of home autonomy into the hands of our customers.