 From Milpitas, California at the edge of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering autonomous vehicles. Brought to you by Western Digital. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Milpitas, California at Western Digital offices for the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Meetup. About 300 people, a lot of conversations about the not thousands, but millions of problems that have to be solved before we get autonomous vehicles on the road. But there's so many angles to this whole story besides just kind of what you think of as just an Uber, a self-driving taxi or even a self-driving car for your personal use. And it's a really cool start up here that's actually celebrating their 100th round trip transaction. We're excited to have Daniel Laurie. He's the CEO and Chief Product Officer of UW. Great to see ya. Nice to meet you, Jeff. So you just came off your keynote presentation and you were showing a great highlight movie of your product. So tell the folks, what are you guys all about? We're the first public road-enabled autonomous driving delivery company. And this is our aim is to cut the cost of last mile deliveries in half and to make deliveries easier, more convenient for consumers, more ubiquitous, faster and cheaper, of course. So it's pretty interesting. So the use case that you're doing now is you're in San Mateo and you're delivering groceries from draggers to the neighborhood. Yes, we actually now have four customers. Oh, you have four, okay. Yes, in a matter of a month. We gained three more after draggers. Draggers was our first customer. We've been working with them for the last six months to find the best cargo space, the way to organize the compartments and everything. And it's been a fantastic partnership. And so they were our first customer and we're doing deliveries for them almost on a daily basis. And then we added three customers. As people were seeing this orange vehicle in the streets, they started calling us and they say, hey, can I do it? So now we have a florist at a Berlin game and a couple of restaurants as well. And how many of these vehicles do you have on the road? So for now, we have one of them. We are getting our second one next week. There is a third one that is going to be ready in about four weeks from today. And then we have a production ramp up from there. So what are some of the unique challenges in creating this vehicle and delivering the service that people probably never thought of? Right, and in our case, first of all, we're not a science project. We're a real business case. Probably one of the first ones in the autonomous driving world. And for us to solve this business case, it's not just about autonomous driving. It's also to have a best customer experience. And so we're not just doing autonomous driving. We're doing a bunch of things. We're building a cargo space. That's mechanical engineering that is adapted, which is basically a system of compartments or lockers and wheels, if you want. The second thing is we're building apps on the merchant side and the customer side. Third thing is the autonomy side of things. We're doing something that very few other companies are doing, which is mastering the first and last hundred feet. Slow motion, high precision, one to two centimeter accuracies to be able to maneuver in parking lots, be able to back up and drive ways, and things like that. Nobody else is doing really that kind of thing. And the last thing, which we're doing, and we're probably one of the world's most advanced companies to do this, is teleoperations. We have to be able to take control of the vehicle. First of all, monitor the fleet. And second, take control of the vehicle in case of a special situation. And we're doing this with an ultra low latency, less than 200 milliseconds between the image we receive from the truck and the command that we're giving back, which allows us to actually drive the vehicle in the streets, as if it was a video game, but it's the reality. Right, no, we did a piece with Phantom Auto. I don't know if you know Phantom, we were doing kind of a general purpose version of that same capability. It's really, really amazing. Frankly, I think that autonomous driving is going to need that capability for at least the next decade. So the last hundred feet is interesting. I went to a Ford Smart Cities event a little while ago, and they talked about kind of curb management. Because when you have all these kind of fleet vehicles getting people in and out, making deliveries in and out, kind of the curb and that interchange of the curb is really a tricky thing. It takes a lot of nuance. You know, no, when to double park. Can you double park? Should you double park? Can you, as you said, get into a driveway? So what's your ideal scenario when you do do a grocery drop-off? Are you trying to get into the driveway, get off the double parking situation? Yes, absolutely. This is a critical part of what we're doing. And parking lots are actually lawless places. You see cups everywhere, but you don't see them in parking lots. We have people backing up from spot. Children pushing carts, pets, you know, you name it. So those are very, very complex situations. And mastering those situations is super important for us because we, of course, our vehicle is gonna park in those parking lots to pick up the goods and potentially to deliver. So we developed an AI stack, an official intelligence stack that starts with a scene estimator. We estimate the scene to see what spots are available, or if it's a driveway, if you have cars parked in the curb, and then be able to actually maneuver in that spot. Right, but you're binding off a lot. So you're doing the apps, you're doing all the infrastructure with your partners, you're doing the complexity of the vehicle, and then you've got to worry about perishable goods. You're taking milk as well as warm stuff. So a lot to chew. How big is your team, kind of, where are you in your development as a company? Yes, we're about 30 people right now, and we are gonna grow this team quite significantly by probably double the size of the team this year. It's a very ambitious project, it's a very ambitious company, and yes, as Elon Musk puts it, success is one of the possibilities, one of the possible outcomes, but not necessarily the likeliest, but we're doing that race, we're in that race. So just before we wrap, I want to talk a little bit about the human factors, because there's a lot of conversation earlier in some of the keynotes about trust and no trust, and on one hand, people don't trust these things, they showed the survey, I don't trust them, on the other hand, we see people in autonomous vehicles as if they were level five, right? They're sleeping and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. When you engage with customers, what are some of the reactions on kind of the trust or not trust? How do they respond to this truck driving up and they walk out and pull their groceries out? That's a great question, but in our case, we're in a very different situation than all the ride-charing and passenger vehicles because by definition, we don't carry passengers. So they only interact with the truck in the sense that they have to retrieve their goods, that's the only thing they do. And so they look at this a lot more favorably than, because they don't have that sense of danger from the vehicle. It's actually more like, wow, this is so interesting and now I'm getting my deliveries, I know exactly, it's gonna be 16 minutes and I get my push notification four minutes before it gets there and then it's a simple, very, very simple way of doing things. It also will be very convenient for returning goods. You will be able to summon the vehicle to your doorstep, you put it into a locker, it goes for you at the UPS, takes a minute to do it. So people love the service, the reaction's been overwhelmingly positive and it's a far less dangerous thing to do than having passengers. Right. Yeah, the first time I saw the video of it, that's my first time was Amazon Locker, which is such a convenient way to interact and so important as we move to smart cities because what you don't want is the proverbial sticker on your door that you miss the delivery. All right, so this is such an important part of the enablement of smart cities. It's a really, really cool story. All right, Daniel, so last word, what getting excited next, gonna get out of individual company relationships and start to more have a generic service that people can tap into? Yes, we're tremendously excited about the future of this company within two or three weeks from having launched a product on January 30th. We've had, we received phone calls from every large retailer you name in the world wanting to do business with us, so it's a very, very exciting start. All right, Daniel, we'll keep an eye. Thank you so much, Jeff. Thanks for stopping by. All right, D's Dan, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Event in Milpitas, California. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time.