In the late 2010s, Mehul Nariyawala observed founders across Silicon Valley racing to get into the autonomous vehicle space. Rather than thinking bigger, he went smaller. “I’m like, wait a minute: There are 100+ teams who believe they can build a robot that doesn’t bump on a bump in a road, but they can’t build a robot that doesn’t bump in a home? That doesn’t make sense,” he told us. So Nariyawala and Matic Robotics CEO and co-founder Navneet Dalal set out to bring AV tech to your kitchen floor. Turns out, that may have been the more difficult path. “A self-driving car has its own challenges, insanely hard problems; I don’t mean to trivialize it,” he told us. “But they don’t need to go really, really close to another car. Usually you have about three, four feet of distance…versus in here, you want to go right next to the furniture, clean, but not bump it, and that’s a much higher-precision challenge.” Nariyawala talked with us about his background, the inspiration behind Matic, the challenge of founding a hardware-intensive business, and what’s next in robotic housekeeping. What’s the most difficult part about building a business, particularly one that’s so hardware intensive? If I knew how hard it was going to be, I would have probably never done it…If hardware is 10x harder than software, then robotics is probably 100x harder. Because not only do we have to build an entire AI layer, similar to, let’s say, OpenAI or Anthropic, but we also have to build hardware and combine everything as a systems problem. Read more.—AS | 
