Investment Notes: Alloy

We’re excited to share that we’ve led a $4.5M Pre-Seed round in Alloy Technologies, marking the starting point of a journey with an operator who we’ve long admired - Joe Harris.

Alloy is building the deployment layer for the physical AI revolution, making it simple for the next 100,000 robotics companies to train, deploy, and monitor AI in the physical world.

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🚀 “Just the person”

Joe is a rare breed and one of the most multi-disciplinary operators we’ve met.

An electrical engineer by training, a software builder by craft, and a commercial leader by impact, Joe’s range is rare. He started his career as a software developer at Atlassian before joining our portfolio company Eucalyptus, rapidly rising in the ranks to Chief Commercial Officer. 

Along the way, he’s also advised companies including Halter, Immutable, and Magic Brief, and he serves as a board observer at Workyard. It is not uncommon to see Joe on a panel or running some masterclass on growth:

More impressive than his career achievements is Joe’s intense curiosity and eagerness to learn. In recent years, he has had a number of “side hustles” outside of work - he has founded and sold a creatine gummy business, started a thriving neighbourhood yoga studio, grown a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) agency to millions in revenue, built an at-home vertical farming project, and hacked together robotics for fun. 

Joe has an unique combination of being relentlessly resourceful, curious, and capable - he is someone whose arc of development makes founding a company feel the natural next step.

Jason Calacanis once said of seed investing, “you don’t need to know if the idea will succeed, just the person”. 

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🌎 The Future of Physical AI

Earlier this year, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang shared his ultimate vision for the future - Physical AI.

In recent years, we have observed a significant leap forward in AI with the shift from perception AI (speech recognition, medical imaging) to generative AI (content creation). 

We are now in the early innings of agentic AI, where AI is not just creating content but taking automated digital actions as well (coding assistants, customer support, etc). Agentic AI is the basis of conversations of a “new digital workforce”.

The next evolution coming is physical AI (humanoids, general robotics, self-driving cars, etc). Physical AI is where intelligence moves from the digital into the real-world. 

At Blackbird, we’ve been long believers in this thesis - from our early investment in robo-taxis (Zoox) to our more recent investments in industrial (August) robots. If you’ve been to San Francisco recently, you may have seen Zoox’s vehicles shuffling passengers around the city - 

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🛠️ Accelerating robotic intelligence

Robotics is exploding. But whether it’s autonomous vehicles, humanoids, defence drones, or agricultural robots, deploying physical AI into the real world across distributed fleets of devices is a nightmare for most teams.

Companies must handle large volumes of data, data labelling, issue debugging, model evaluations, model training and deployment, retraining and updates, all on edge devices that are often in complex field environments. 

There are limited solutions to handle this off-the-shelf and most robotics companies are forced to configure their own band-aided solutions.

Alloy hopes to solve this with a dev ops platform that abstracts away these complexities to enable robotics companies to focus on their core products versus “glue code”. 

The ultimate goal is to be the primary dev ops platform that enables “robots to learn from experience”.

We are thrilled to partner with Joe from day zero, at the moment of company formation, and help build the foundations for the upcoming era of physical intelligence. He is currently assembling a core technical team, embedding with design partners, and building Alloy’s MVP. 

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