Last week, I talked about how an investor would analyze a startup building something completely new with high technical risk and low market risk. That company was Loyal, which makes dog life-longevity drugs. From a market perspective, it is one of the most no-brainer investments if they can pull off the tech, which obviously is a huge challenge.
It got me thinking: what are some potential startups where a company can create something new that may be very technically challenging but with minimal risk from a market standpoint that makes a current process either much better or much cheaper?
I closed the essay by saying I’m not sure Figure AI qualifies as a low-market risk company since many other startups and large companies are going after humanoid robots. I do, however, think intelligent robots will be highly prevalent in our world in the coming decades, so I thought about where intelligent robots could best be applied to enhance our world while being financially worthwhile for an investor.
For some reason, perhaps due to my Pittsburgh upbringing or the fact that I just read (and loved) Last Train to Paradise, my mind went right to automated bridge inspection and repair robots. Exciting right?!
I’ll get more into why I chose bridges later. For context, the government currently spends nearly $3b every two years on bridge inspection, despite the push for annual or semi-annual inspections, so there’s a need for greater efficiency there. Additionally, the government spends almost $15 billion a year on bridge repair, while estimates say there is currently about $125 billion in bridge repair spending needed to repair all of America’s bridges currently in poor condition.
So there’s certainly a market, and the current solution, human labor, is not getting the job done.
Perfect equation for disruption!
I’m talking about companies that create robots that don’t just inspect the physical object but repair the object as well. Sell the work. Construction and AI seem to be one of the best applications for selling the work, and bridge repair is a good place to start.
Is that easy to build? I have no idea, but probably not!
Can someone build it? Probably eventually!
Is it worth building if you can? Definitely!
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