Marin Tchakarov, CEO of Kindred AI (Powered by Ocado Solutions) returns to share his thoughts on the rise of AI and robotics in ecommerce.
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Danny:
- Well hello and welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by Marin Tchakarov who is the CEO of
Kindred, Powered by
Ocado. Marin, thank you so much for joining me again on the IndustrialSage Executive Series.
Marin:
- Pleasure to be here, Danny. It's been a while. Good to be back.
Danny:
- It has been a while. A lot has happened since then. Maybe for those who didn't watch
the first episode when you were on—and if they haven't, they need to go listen or watch it right now—but for those who aren't familiar with Kindred, tell me a little bit about who you guys are and what you do.
Marin:
- Sure, we're a smart robotics company in the ecommerce fulfillment vertical space. We were founded in 2014 by a collection of brilliant artificial intelligence and machine learning engineers and scientists. Fast forward to 2017. We productized what today is known as SORT which is a smart robot solution that automates a manual sortation station, or as they are called, “put walls” in ecomm fulfillment centers across the country. And so the essence of what we do is, we utilize artificial intelligence that powers machine vision to singulate—that is machine-vision speak for seeing—an item set, the items within it distinct and separate from one another. And then we have a patented AutoGrasp technology that identifies where we will pick a particular item to then effect a successful scan and stow. We essentially automate via smart robotics-type, machine vision-type solution, manual put walls in ecomm fulfillment centers.
Danny:
- Excellent. Well there's no, I'm sure, lack of challenges or opportunities in the industry right there, specifically as we look at ecomm and what has happened over the last several months. Really another big thing happened and a big change since when we had spoken last. I think it was probably, I think it was February, March, or April of 2020. I'm totally forgetting the time.
Marin:
- Perhaps a little bit later than that. I want to say July or so, but yeah, sometime in 2020.
Danny:
- It was definitely—it wasn't BC, before Covid, it was after.
Marin:
- That's right.
Danny:
- Certainly there are some things that have happened since then. There was an acquisition that happened. Tell us about that.
Marin:
- Yeah, extremely exciting. We closed the acquisition by Ocado Group in December of last year, of 2020. An extremely exciting endeavor for the company in ways that it affords us the ability to accelerate our product development, our initiatives. And so we were very much on path to do ambitious things prior to the acquisition, but many of those would have been serial in nature. They would have been sequential. We would have chosen one or two to do at the same time, if that, and then sequence them out in our future. Now, with the backing of the powerhouse that Ocado Group is, we can focus on a few things at a time. We have four key focal areas for Kindred in front of us. In no particular order, one is to invest in our technology stack to improve our capabilities, to enhance our capabilities to handle a variety of items. In other words, to enhance and expand our item set capabilities. It's extremely exciting.
