Hiten Sonpal

Cleaned & Rewritten Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, sentence structure tightened, paragraphs broken for clarity. The substance, meaning, and voice of the conversation are unchanged.

Henry Harrison: Welcome to Entrepreneurs, Business and Finance, the Henry Harrison Podcast. We're welcoming today on our show a very interesting CEO and businessperson, Hiten Sonpal. He is the CEO of a technology company, and I'm going to let him speak about it, since it's his company. Hello.

Hiten Sonpal: Hi, Henry. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I'm CEO of RISE Robotics. We're an MIT-affiliated startup based in Somerville, Massachusetts, and our core technology is replacing hydraulics. We build fluid-free linear actuators for heavy machines. Not only do we enable the electrification of these machines, but we also enable teleoperation and autonomy.

Henry Harrison: Step back a minute. MIT-affiliated — what does that mean for those that don't know?

Hiten Sonpal: The founding team is largely from MIT. They started the company in 2011. They had a vision to build an exosuit — think the Iron Man suit without the jet pack. They had left MIT when they started this, so I say affiliated because we're not a spin-out per se, but we still have strong connections with MIT.

They had this vision to build this exosuit, and they started designing it and looking for how they were going to move the various actuators inside it. The goal was to build something you could lift a car with and topple it. Something that strong. It could be used for military applications, inside warehouses. Scaled-down versions could help the elderly move around with assistance.

As the team looked at the technologies that were out there, they realized there was really nothing they could use for the system. They looked at hydraulic systems, but those were heavy, slow, leaked, inefficient. So they had to invent something new. We invented this technology called Beltdraulic, which I'll get into in a second. Once they invented Beltdraulic, they realized it was better to tackle the existing hydraulics market — which was huge, at $750 billion a year — than to try to invent an exosuit market where they could put the technology inside it.

Henry Harrison: Talk about hydraulics. What are the uses for hydraulics?

Hiten Sonpal: Hydraulics is used in all kinds of heavy machinery, especially in any heavy machine where you need to pull or push or lift or lower. In those systems there really haven't been any innovations in electrical actuators. So companies — even the ones that try to electrify their machines — ultimately end up using electricity to run a pump, which pushes liquid around, and the liquid eventually moves the piston, and the piston then finally does the real work that needs to be done, whether that's lifting, pulling, pushing or lowering.

Henry Harrison: Got it. Some of this I do know, but I'd rather you be the one to say it, and not everybody does know. Looking behind you there is part of your facility. What in the world do you do down there with all that equipment?

Hiten Sonpal: This is our lab. Since we're at the very beginnings of scaling the company, we do our development and manufacturing here. We have a fair number of products that you can see. Let me see if I can get to one of our first products. That product back there — the one with the hook on it — is a collapsible lift crane that we built. I want to make sure you can see the hook. That was built for the Air Force.

They had a specific mission where they wanted to lift 150 pounds into a plane, and the existing device they were going to use weighed 1,800 pounds. We built them something that did the same thing but weighs 300 pounds. So it's 1,200 pounds lighter, which they promptly turned into fuel, which gave them more range for the mission. It was really exciting.

They bought $1.5 million worth of that product under commercial terms. That was really our first product, and it happened before I joined the company. It was one of the things that gave me confidence that what I needed to do in this company was not really science, but to actually commercialize technology that had already been productized.

Henry Harrison: Let's talk about that. They developed that crane — if I'm calling it the right thing. And then who built the crane for the military?

Hiten Sonpal: We built the crane ourselves, because the quantities were very small. When we looked at our initial production contract, it was small enough that we felt we could tackle it in-house. If the contract size had been much larger or much longer, we would have engaged a contract manufacturer to help us with the process. But it did make sense at those volumes and the timing they were looking for.

Henry Harrison: So when you're talking about commercialization, you're taking concepts, potentially — the original one was a concept — or technologies, and taking them to the stage where someone wants to buy them and use them. And then you'll work with... if you can make it yourself, you'll make it, or you'll work with a big contract manufacturer if it's something beyond the scope of the size that you want to be at, at the moment. Is that correct?

Hiten Sonpal: That's correct. When you're thinking about the early stages of commercializing a business, you're not only thinking about how to scale production — that's one piece of it — but you also have to think about scaling application engineering.

When we talk about hydraulics, I mentioned it's a big market. $150 billion out of the $750 billion is in industrial systems, and $600 billion is in mobile hydraulics. Think off-highway heavy machines, bulldozers. Rather than talking about machines, maybe it's easier to talk about sectors: construction, agriculture, marine, mining, forestry. These are the big sectors where you end up using these systems. For each of those verticals, you need to develop a little bit of an application engineering team that understands the specific requirements of the customer.

For example, mining is often running 24/7. It's very repeatable. When you think about construction, the machines aren't operated as often, but they have to deal with — call it operator abuse. They have to deal with a wide range of environments and uses of the equipment that you didn't think about. Sometimes you build something that's used to dig, and since it happens to be the only tool on site, it'll be used to push things and drag things. You have to understand what those use cases are.

Taking a step back: scaling a business isn't just about building the manufacturing team. It's also scaling the application engineering group so we understand the end user's pain points, and it's about building the sales and marketing team so we can support them, and then distribution. All of that has to be thought through in terms of scaling. For a company at this scale, it's a very interesting problem, and one that I have some expertise in, having spent a fair amount of time at iRobot.

Henry Harrison: Maybe that's a good lead-in. Talk about how you developed the experience to become the CEO of this company. And then we can lead into what the future goals of the company are, because they brought you in — or you decided to come in — a few years ago, and I'm sure there are reasons and plans that came along with that.

Hiten Sonpal: I spent a large portion of my career at iRobot Corporation. They invented the Roomba, if you're familiar with that product. But they also had a military group, which I joined initially. I joined the military group because I'd been working with a consulting firm that had DARPA and iRobot as clients. It was a three-organization team, and we were working on soldier-portable robots.

9/11 happened at the same time we were working on these systems, and we got the call from DARPA within two hours of it happening. They said, "Where are those robots?" We had to take the prototypes, which weren't really finished, and quickly get them into a state where they could be deployed. The company I was with was a small consulting firm, and the owner was a private pilot, so he was able to take our robots, get them on a plane — he was one of five planes flying the day after 9/11 — flying these robots to Ground Zero.

Up until that point, I'd been pretty much a geek interested in just the tech and solving interesting engineering problems. But at that moment there was a shift inside me, because I felt I was making such a big difference — that the product I was working on was going to be used to save lives.

At that point I decided I wanted to find a way to work for iRobot, because they were doing other interesting things in the defense space. A couple of years later I joined them. I worked in the military business, which ended up shipping 1,200 robots to Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily used for bomb disposal. It was a wonderful time, because everybody in that organization was very mission-driven. We knew we were saving lives, and that was very exciting.

Then iRobot spun off its military business and I stayed in the consumer business. There I ended up leading a number of product development teams, and we collectively shipped nine million units, generated $2 billion in revenues, across 20 products.

During that journey I kept taking on more and more responsibility. Sometimes I had to take a step down in the organization so I could broaden my scope. I did that because I had mentors in the organization who recommended that if I really wanted to grow, I couldn't just grow straight up. I had to start broadening my base so I could take on more and more responsibility.

Then COVID happened, and the project I was working on was canceled. I was working on Roomba for your Lawn — the next big thing at iRobot, a robotic lawnmower. We couldn't launch because of COVID. I looked around and there really wasn't much more I could do at iRobot, so I left and tried to spin that project out into its own organization to see if I could complete it. Given the timing, I was not successful. But in that journey of trying to spin out that business, I learned how to talk to VCs and understood what they were looking for.

Because of that experience — where I didn't really succeed, but I gained all this experience and learning — I was recruited by a startup based out of Dallas called Mowbot. They hired me as their head of product and strategy, and eventually promoted me to be their CEO. After that, I joined a company called Electric Sheep Robotics, where I was president. They were based in the Bay Area doing commercial robotic lawnmowers. Then I did some consulting briefly, because they were not able to raise their next round.

Then I met a friend who worked at RISE Robotics and told me what they were doing, so I joined them as a consultant, helping them commercialize their tech, which is what they were looking for. At some point they asked me to be their CEO. That was the journey getting here.

One of the things that really excited me about RISE is this lab you see back here. Anyone who visits this lab realizes that the company has spent almost zero dollars on waste. It's all gone into R&D. There aren't a lot of creature comforts in our lab or facility. We do the minimum required to retain employees, and we meet all of the OSHA requirements — we pass all of the OSHA audits. But our focus is really on the R&D. That got me really excited.

Then I took a look at the company's patents. Initially, when my friend told me about the company, I didn't think what they were doing was possible. I didn't think there was a way to replace hydraulics with anything but screw-type actuators, and I knew those didn't scale up. But after I looked at the patents, I was really excited and really wanted to find a way to work with these folks. One thing led to another, and now I'm CEO.

Henry Harrison: What does the future look like — the future plan for the company that you can share publicly?

Hiten Sonpal: We have three business areas. We have our defense business. As I mentioned, we had really good success shipping the collapsible crane to the Air Force, so they asked us to tackle their next big hydraulic problem.

Just to take a step back: the existing crane we were replacing was a hydraulic-based system. Once they saw us come up with a solution that didn't require hydraulics, they said, "Okay, our next big problem is these aerial lift trucks." They have devices called MHU-83s. They're munitions handling units, rated to lift 5,000 pounds, and they're typically used to attach munitions onto planes.

The latest munitions have gotten much heavier than these trucks can handle. This truck design is from the '80s, so it ends up leaking a lot of hydraulic fluid. These are diesel-powered machines, so they're loud, they emit smoke, and sometimes the munitions are being loaded in hangars. Our warfighters end up inhaling diesel smoke. They're subject to a lot of vibration. There's a lot of noise, so they're wearing ear protection, but they're yelling over the machines, which reduces their efficacy.

Just watching the operations of one of these systems, you realize this tech is really outdated and needs to be replaced with something new. And I forgot to mention — it leaks hydraulic oil. When we've gone to visit these sites and watched the operators use these machines, one of the things they tell us right away is: those hydraulic oil spills, they're like ice patches. Do not step on them, otherwise you're going to slip and fall and get injured. Because they're telling us this, we know it's happened to our warfighters. Even if they're just doing exercises, they're subject to equipment that's not really state-of-the-art, and I think they deserve something better.

So we're excited about that mission. We're modernizing these aerial lift trucks with something that's completely electric, that uses our core technology, that is hydraulic-free and quiet, and can be diesel or electric. To make it a hybrid system you would just attach a diesel generator, because the system inherits drive-by-wire and electric on the inside. Then you could choose when it would be noisy. You could choose when it would emit smoke. If you needed to be in a quiet setting, you would just turn it off. Lots of flexibility in this next-generation system.

The first thing we did for them was build a prototype of the core arm, because lifting 7,000 pounds is a substantial challenge — and you're lifting it underneath the plane, so the truck has to be off to the side, and you have this seven-foot reach where you're trying to lift 7,000 pounds. That's a big challenge.

We ended up designing something that used that big cylinder there. That cylinder is attached to a forklift test stand. It's capable of lifting 22 tons. We put that into the system and built them a prototype arm that could lift 7,000 pounds. Did a demo. They were really excited about it.

The team then realized we had built the world's strongest robotic arm. So we called a Guinness World Record team, and we got into the Guinness Book for building the world's strongest robotic arm. That helped us in a couple of ways. First, for a lot of us it was on our bucket lists to get into the Guinness Book, so that was fantastic. But the second thing was that we really wanted to make it evident that what we were building was as strong as hydraulic systems. We were replacing a 5,000-pound arm built out of hydraulics with a 7,000-pound arm that was completely all-electric. That was a huge accomplishment for us, and it's brought us a lot of inbound interest on the sales side.

After we built that arm, we won a $3 million contract extension. This happened in January, and now we're building the full air lift truck — the full device. That's going to go into pilots at the end of next year, and then we expect it to go into production afterwards. There are about 1,500 of these that have to get replaced, so it's a huge opportunity for us. But that's on the defense side of the business.

Then we have a liftgate business. Let me show you here — I think you might be able to see we have a liftgate down there that we're testing. What we built is the first hydraulic-free liftgate. Liftgates are challenging devices because they're trying to do a lot. That particular liftgate lifts 5,500 pounds.

The common failure mode is, of course, that the hydraulic system fails. But because hydraulic systems are inefficient and consume a lot of battery, another common failure mode is that it kills the battery — either on the liftgate or, worse, on the truck. Then the truck is stranded, or the liftgate is stranded open. You have to send another truck out to get it back into the shop, and that's a substantial cost. So between reliability, downtime, and efficiency — because our systems can run much faster than hydraulic systems — we believe we have a compelling value proposition there. We're developing that liftgate in partnership with Anthony Liftgates, and currently we're in pilots with a very large fleet.

Then on the cylinder side, we're building cylinders to sell directly to OEMs that want to build hydraulic-free machines. We selected our first three customers — and I say selected, not landed, because we have more inbound than we can handle. But we have to be very picky about the customers we pick, because it's easy to partner with someone that's very large and very slow and consumes a lot of your time and money before they decide they don't want to work with you, or they have a reorganization, or your key stakeholder leaves.

So at this time we want to work with nimble organizations that have a specific pain point they're trying to address. The first customer we selected on the cylinder side is in the oil and gas sector. Their challenge is that they're building natural gas pumps to capture natural gas that's escaping from oil wells, and they're pumping it up to sellable pressure. Their hydraulic pumps fail every three months — the hydraulic system gets fouled up, so they have to go service it. These pumps are distributed across oil wells all over West Texas, so the process of getting to them, servicing them, and getting them back up has a substantial impact on revenue and manpower.

By using our cylinders, we expect they'll be able to extend the service life to nine months. That doesn't seem like a lot, but since they can't hire any more people to service their systems, we're going to triple their service revenues for the same team. So we really try to focus on those key pain points and those key areas where we can make a difference.

We're also piloting with them. We're in this very early stage of commercialization where we understand the segments we want to get into, and we're starting to build in small volumes — call it low-rate initial production, which we're doing here — and then eventually intend to start getting to scale.

That was a long answer to a short question.

Henry Harrison: Well, it's very, very interesting. And for those that don't know, a pilot is when you're actually testing something in a small number, or maybe even a unit of one. It can mean many different things. But then after pilot... it goes through steps. So, idea to it being used.

Hiten Sonpal: Yeah.

Henry Harrison: And when I say used, I mean used like the crane. It's very interesting, I think — saving lives, right? Using those robots to disarm, instead of people going in with those big suits that don't totally protect them.

Hiten Sonpal: Yeah. So, back to all the steps. Certainly you have an idea, and then you want to... Well, let me take another step back here. Generally, when you think about product development, you're trying to solve for the intersection of feasibility, desirability, and viability.

Feasibility is: can you actually, from an engineering perspective, design a solution that works? Desirability is: okay, so you build something that's novel and it works, but does your customer really want it? You've got to test for that. And then the last piece is viability: you've built something novel, you've found a pain point and the customer's interested, but can you actually make it and sell it in a way that the business is viable and can make money?

We've done the feasibility part very well. We have a handful of bugs that we find when working with customers on corner cases they discover. The pilot is predominantly about confirming the desirability of the product. The customer that's building these natural gas pumps wants to make sure our systems run for 90 days as a key initial test. If they run for 90 days, then they want to deploy more of them, and we're going to continue to work with them to improve the reliability of the systems way past their target of nine months, to see if we can get to two years. That process allows the customer to validate the system.

Usually the engineering team will do verification — they'll say, "I need to build according to the spec." They'll test all the specs. But when you get it into a real-world environment, you often discover things you didn't know. For example, these systems are going to be in West Texas, where it's very hot. We can certainly test for heat. But then there's a lot of sand and dirt and dust flying around. There's only so much testing we can do for that. And then there's the combination — sometimes it might rain and there might be mud, and there might be other things that happen to the well and the external environment that you're not aware of. There might be pressures in the gas you didn't expect. There might be liquid entering the system, and we've done some testing, but maybe it happens a lot more often than what's in the spec.

So the pilot allows us to discover all of those corner cases, and it also gives the customer confidence that what they're buying is worth putting into their operations. Most businesses — especially the ones in the service sector — are making money through operational efficiency, and they certainly don't want to introduce anything into their operations that's going to cause their operations to get messed up.

Back to the big picture of the journey: we start with the idea, we build a prototype, we do some initial testing, and we finally build what we think is a product. We do the verification testing, so we feel it meets the spec. Then we go into pilot, where we do validation. At the same time, we're setting up the production line, and then we get a production unit, and then we do production validation testing, which tests that we can repeatedly make the product. And then we finally have a product that can be sold and a business that can be scaled.

Henry Harrison: It's fantastic, really. Exciting, neat, cool — however you want to describe it. Start out with an idea and you end up with the strongest robotic arm in the world, and now you're taking that, with support, to pilot. And then from pilot to, hopefully, mass production.

Hiten Sonpal: Yes. We're all excited about the impact we can make with our products.

Henry Harrison: And that's just one. That's an easy one that jumps out — a little less technical than pumps running in West Texas on oil and gas. People can understand lifting something up.

Talk about patents too. It's not easy to get patents. Obviously a lot of smart guys, yourself included, in the company have developed patents.

Hiten Sonpal: Before I jump into patents, it might be helpful to take a minute and talk about how the core technology is different from a hydraulic system.

The best way to describe it is to think about humans and how we move. Any time we're pushing something, the internals are actually pulling. When you think about all our muscles, the only thing they can do is pull — it's the muscle in combination with the joint that generates the push force.

Because the internal movement is all pulling motions, it's actually very fast. If you think about how quickly you can move your hand for the size of the muscle, you can move it very, very fast. It's very efficient — think about how little food you have to eat to work the whole day. They haven't built humanoid robots that can operate a whole day, and billions of dollars have been spent on battery technology. So think about how efficient the pulling motion of muscles is. And think about how durable they are, because they last a lifetime. Yes, they're organic, so they need blood and nutrients, but generally speaking they're very strong and they last a very long time.

Now, if I were to take those muscles and replace them with a bladder, so that instead of pulling on the inside I was pushing — so to open my elbow I'd pump blood into a bladder in the bicep area, and to close my arm I'd pump blood into the tricep area — you can imagine how slow it would be, with all the liquid sloshing around on the inside. You can imagine how energy inefficient it would be, because you're moving this heavy liquid that's not really contributing to the output. And then you think about the pressures that would have to happen inside to generate that motion, and you realize they would fail much faster than muscles.

That's the core deficiency of hydraulics. They're always going to be slow, they're always going to end up leaking, and they're always going to be inefficient. The inherent design of it doesn't allow you to get any better.

So what the team has done, inspired by muscles, is change the design. On the inside of the cylinders, instead of pushing with liquid, we're pulling with something that resembles fibers. And for fibers, we picked these belts that have been in the elevator industry for the last 20 years or so. They're relatively new. The elevator industry has replaced steel cables with flat belts made out of steel and plastic, and these belts last the lifetime of the building. They're very, very strong.

Our core IP is around how we put these belts into a very compact form factor, how we use these belts to pull the piston back and forth, how we take rotary electrical power coming in from a motor, and how we turn it into linear power in a very efficient way. Compared to a hydraulic system, we are three times as fast, three times as efficient, and three times as durable. Our core IP is around all the bits and pieces of it — taking the rotary power in, converting it into belt power, packaging the belt power into a very small form factor, and then converting the belt power into linear motion on the output.

Henry Harrison: Just to give an idea — is that one patent? Is that 10 patents?

Hiten Sonpal: It's over 20.

Henry Harrison: Over 20. So quite a number of patents. It's not an easy process to get a patent. It takes a number of years, and money, and clearly distinct technology.

Hiten Sonpal: We're really excited. That is definitely one of our moats. A lot of companies that are doing AI these days are struggling with the fact that things that were impossible yesterday are possible today, next month are going to be trivial, and a month from now are going to be free. You don't really have a moat in that business. The only thing you can do is run as fast as possible and make sure nobody catches up. It takes a lot of investment, and the moment you stop investing, someone can catch up.

We don't have that challenge. It's going to be very challenging to get into our space. We have a huge moat of patents. There's a ton of R&D. Making atoms move and testing them is very challenging — you can't just do it all in software. That gives us staying power.

Henry Harrison: When you were a kid, did you think you'd be in America? We talked ahead of time, so I'm a little bit familiar. Did you think you'd be a CEO of a technology company in robotics? Of course, robotics weren't... I guess there were cartoons and science fiction movies with robotics. But in the US — how did that journey come about? Your parents must be proud, I guess.

Hiten Sonpal: Yes, they are. I hope they are. They tell me they are. Although in my household there wasn't a lot of praise — that helps drive you. People talk about Asian parents being very pushy and having very high standards.

When I was in India, I wanted to study computer engineering. I did have this idea that I was going to do something in robotics, but I really wanted to focus on the electronics and the software aspects of it. At the time, there just weren't enough schools in India offering computer engineering as an option. There was this joint entrance exam where you could enter the state schools my family could afford, with well over a million students taking the test, and you had to be in the top 50 if you wanted to do computer engineering, because it was a new field and very high in demand.

I didn't make it to the top 50. So I took the SAT. I scored in the top 1%, and that really paved the way for me to get a student visa to come to the United States.

During that time, my parents had applied for a green card. They'd applied well before I came here for college — that was a 13-year wait for them. They got their green card while I was still in the United States, and because I was under 21 by a few months, I also ended up getting my green card. Then they immigrated.

That was my start, and everything that's happened since then has been a product of hard work, but also the opportunities that the United States provides, being about as close to a meritocracy as you can imagine. The system's not perfect, but I could have never imagined being a CEO somewhere else. I wouldn't necessarily have had all the paths. In the United States, if you work hard and you deliver, it doesn't really matter who you are — you just keep getting responsibility. People want to work with people who are willing to solve problems and don't give up.

Henry Harrison: I like the Walmart example. You can start out without any education, in the simplest job, and you can be a store manager — and those stores are very large and highly paid. They just care about your abilities and your work and your accomplishments when you're there. So, a lot of good things in America. Glad you're here. I've been here a long time now.

And it's also hard. A lot of those companies — or at least one or two, I recall one specifically — didn't get funding. This company, you've been there two years. Presumably they brought you in to help take them to the next level. But they've been around since 2011, and those rounds of funding that didn't come through for the other ones — however, they've made it. They made it to where there's some stature and stability, and based on their patents and technology, and you and the team, a future. Because that's not easy either. All these people with ideas and technology that are really smart — they don't usually make it 15 years.

Hiten Sonpal: That's right. As I mentioned, the company when I joined was working on DOD contracts and joint development contracts for proofs of concept and so on. It's taken me roughly two years. I'm doing what the founders wanted to do when they brought me on board, which is getting the company to a more commercial setup.

As part of that, we've had to raise money. One of the things we're doing that's innovative is how we're raising money. What we did was take advantage of this law called Regulation Crowdfunding, which was passed by the Obama administration. I think it's going to get expanded by the Trump administration. It allowed companies to let retail investors — everyday people like you and me, who aren't necessarily accredited investors — invest in private companies, and they put some restrictions in place to make sure it was all fair and above board.

The whole process is that a company like ours can partner with what's called a platform. The platform vets the company, and they make sure all the right disclosures are provided to retail investors, and then they marry the two. We picked Wefunder as our platform, and we took our last institutional round and basically opened it up to retail investors using this rule called Regulation Crowdfunding.

Last year we ended up getting $5.8 million of interest from retail investors in the company. We're only allowed to take $5 million in 12 months, so our round was oversubscribed. We ended up being the number one campaign under the Regulation Crowdfunding laws last year. We just opened up a second round, and we've already raised $2 million.

We're doing well. Our story is resonating with a lot of folks. We're getting many people who have been in the hydraulics space, who have used hydraulics in some way, who understand the challenges of it and see that the transition away from hydraulics is inevitable. We happen to be positioned very well to take advantage of that transition.

Henry Harrison: You could be in a science fiction movie too. You've got the claw. Don't leave out the claw.

Hiten Sonpal: That's right.

Henry Harrison: A little attempt at light humor for a serious topic of a lot of important things that can change the world.

Robotics is just one — I mean, AI is a big part. Robotics and AI are... Elon Musk is obviously putting them together. I think it's going to be constantly... Of course, AI's going to be in everything, if it isn't already. There's a movie, I, Robot. I don't know if it had anything to do with the company, but it's probably the first exposure a lot of people had to robots.

Hiten Sonpal: Yes. Humanoid robots and the way we think of them — mimicking humans and so on. Definitely that movie.

Henry Harrison: Those types of robots. I should be more specific — human robots.

Hiten Sonpal: That's right. Star Wars had some robots that got people inspired. The common connection between the two is that the founders of iRobot were inspired by the book I, Robot, and so they built a company and named it iRobot.

One of the fun things that happened is that when the I, Robot movie came out, they had a few folks from the company be in the movie as extras, which is really interesting. And when the premiere of the movie happened in Boston, everyone in the company got a few free tickets to go see it. It was a fun event — a good team-building event for us.

Henry Harrison: Oh, yeah. Well, I don't know if there's anything you'd like to wrap up on, Hiten, but I think that's fantastic. A lot of people are going to... I think everybody should watch this and learn and enjoy. So congratulations, and best of luck. Feel free to wrap up with something if you'd like, or we can call it right now.

Hiten Sonpal: If any of your viewers know folks in the hydraulics space who are having trouble with their hydraulic systems, we'd love for them to reach out to us. Our website is riserobotics.com. And if any of your viewers feel like this is a technology they want to own — to be part owner in the company — they can reach out to us at invest.riserobotics.com. But if they just want to connect with me, they can find me on LinkedIn. I usually accept meeting invites from interesting people.

Henry Harrison: Fantastic. I love the name, too — RISE Robotics. Whoever came up with that was a smart guy.

Hiten Sonpal: It's not me. The founding team did.

Henry Harrison: I know. But hey, you want to be around smart people, and they got you. Well, terrific. Thanks again, and we'll be in touch.

Hiten Sonpal: Thank you, Henry. Thank you so much.