Latest / Talk Commerce / Drone Delivery and Last Mile Infrastructure with Dan O'Toole of Arrive AI
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:01.132) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today. I Dan O'Toole. Sorry, he is the founder of Arrive AI. Dan, go ahead, do a much more eloquent introduction for yourself. us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. Dan O'Toole (00:15.255) I was just going to say Brent, the way you fumbled my name when I graduated college, they said David, Steven O'Toole. And this is my moment. I said, it's Daniel, Steven O'Toole. And they go, Daniel, Steven. So I got two shout outs. So thanks Brent. so Hey, I'm Dan O'Toole, CEO at Arrive AI based out of Fishers, Indiana. Proudly went public on the NASDAQ, May 15th of this year, ticker symbol, A-R-A-I. Yeah, we're iterating at the intersection of. Brent Peterson (00:28.618) Nice. Yep, you're welcome. Dan O'Toole (00:45.173) autonomy and AI in the last mile space. know, serial entrepreneur, four kids grew up in Indiana, just living the dream, pinching myself every day. Brent Peterson (00:58.158) Perfect. And passions outside of that? Kids or? Dan O'Toole (01:01.215) You know, I'm a huge risk taker. like to gamble. I'm a car collector. I love, never met a car I didn't love and that's my real passion. And I'd love to, you know, enjoy my family and do things with my wife. Just life's great, man. Brent Peterson (01:17.582) Alright Dan. So before we start, we're going to talk about autonomous delivery and drones and things like that. I'm going to tell you a joke. You just give me a rating 8 through 13. So here we go. I went to the doctor today. He said he'd like to talk to me about my weight. I said, well, it was about 45 minutes, but the chairs are very comfortable. Dan O'Toole (01:43.523) I'm gonna give that about, let's go 10.3. Because I figured out the punchline with it. It's so much of a dad joke. Brent Peterson (01:47.361) Okay, thank you. Brent Peterson (01:53.066) Yes, absolutely. Yeah, they're all going to be dad jokes. All right. All right, Dan. Yeah. All right. So you gave me a little bit your backstory in the intro in the green room. But why don't you kind of give us the elevator pitch on arrive AI and kind of how we got to where you're going. Dan O'Toole (01:56.611) Thanks, Brad. Go ahead, man. Dan O'Toole (02:12.129) Yeah, you know, it started with an idea in 2014. know, drone delivery was just kind of being thought about. And, you know, the thing I was thinking about was, Dren delivery is great, you know, and all that, but the notion of picking every delivery up from the ground or dropping it to the ground, to me, were non-scalable. So how do you unlock all the value that autonomous delivery promises? And the way you do that is by having a safe, secure arrive point in that ecosystem. So, you know, just being an entrepreneur and missing out on some great patents. One thing I figured out out Brent is when one person has an idea, 10 other people have the same idea. And if you're not first, you're last. And so, you know, in my past, I'm lost to, if you think about the previous control button on your TV remote, I had the idea for that. And I went to patent it and Sony beat me by a month on that. I had an idea for a medical device. went to patent that. GM beat me by three months on a medical device. So when I had this, I called my patent attorney on a Friday. I said, John, I got this idea. I don't want to do a patent search. I don't want to do a provisional. I want to file a full utility patent on Monday. I'll have everything to you. All weekend long I worked. ran in Monday, gave it to him. We filed it and when it issued, it revealed that I had beaten Amazon by four days. I beat the US Postal Service by two weeks. I beat another company by 22 days. So by losing those other patents, I gained this one. And this is the biggest opportunity in the world. So thank you. Thank you, God. Right. Brent Peterson (03:47.244) Yeah, that's awesome. So tell us, I mean, I think people have been hearing this concept of autonomous delivery for a long time, but tell us kind of how you're making it actually happen. Dan O'Toole (03:59.619) Yeah, know, the history of the company, financed it for the first six and a half years out of my own pocket. Then we did three successive crowdfunding rounds. We raised about 15 million over the last four years. And then we made it to the public market on the NASDAQ this year. having that funding has given us the impetus to really accelerate. So since May of this year, we went from six W2 employees to around 50. We moved to a new location. We secured a $40 million capitalization for the company. And we're just on hyper speed. I would say if you have your accelerator pedal all the way to the floor and you let up for one second, you never get back when you reapply to where you were. So we're not letting up. We're accelerating as fast as we can. The market is accelerating around us. know, drones, unmanned vehicles, robots, all these things are accelerating and being showcased in different opportunities throughout the country, throughout the world. And we're right aligned with that. I don't think the timing could be better. I think the market has been conditioned for our there couldn't be a better time and here we are and that's everything. Brent Peterson (05:14.178) Yeah, that's great. We spend our summers in Minnesota and I saw that Minnesota is going to get their first WIMOs. So is there challenges around weather and things like that and autonomous delivery? Dan O'Toole (05:24.865) You know, there's always challenges, just like there is for a FedEx truck in a snowstorm, right? I mean, everything has its pros and cons, right? You know, we are, we're the access point, we're the arrive point in the ecosystem. We're... platform agnostic universal welcoming to all shippers and delivers whether you're a drone a truck conventional unmanned vehicle robot whatever you know we're going to be that access point we're going to give you notifications heated and cooled cargo area live streaming video you know all these things that you've never had with just a regular mailbox and that's what you're going to come to love eventually all your commerce will flow through your arrive app you know you can archive all of your transactional history if you want to send something back It can all be orchestrated from your app at your curbside. You know, I call it a shipping store at your door. You don't need to go to Whole Foods, Kohl's, the UPS store. You can go to your curb and deal with all that. If you're looking for something to come in and you can't remember because you have so many orders, all your purchases are right there. You pick up, you can open up a list of open orders that you have. Find out one was canceled. They didn't even tell you, but you see it right here. You see the other ones delivering today. You know, it's going to be everything. You can buy sell return. It's your it's your new life Brent Peterson (06:45.612) Yeah, so give us an idea of how it works in the real world. And have you deployed one anywhere that is working in real life? Dan O'Toole (06:54.691) Yeah, right now we're working with Hancock Health, which is a medium sized health care facility campus in central Indiana. We have an ecosystem with robots and our arrive points. We're doing autonomous and asynchronous deliveries and asynchronous is a new term to a lot of people, but it's an exciting one because up until now you've had to be, you if you have a say a computer or an iPhone come into your house, you have to be there to meet carrier on that otherwise they're not going to deliver so people taking off work you know all these kind of things so asynchronous means every delivery node can operate on its own cadence so Right now, if you're at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, and you order a Starbucks from Starship, a little robot, you have to be there to meet the robot. If you're not there, the robot's waiting on you. If the robot's there and you're not, it's waiting on you. With Arrive, we free flow everything. A drone can drop something off, you can get a notification, you can dispatch a robot to pick it up, and you can be wherever that robot's gonna bring it to you. Everything happens on its own. its own flow and nothing's being held up. Brent Peterson (08:12.204) Yeah, on a lighter side, we have had a guest who had a, he called it the poop copter and he built a drone that goes around your backyard and through AI and visualization, it finds your dog's deposits and then deposits them in another spot. It sounds like you've gone one step further and are you also planning on doing something like the poop copter? Dan O'Toole (08:36.685) You know, we're not the drone or not the robot. We're not the unman vehicle. don't want to be in the we were because we're open to everybody right? Co-op petition people say who's your who's your competition? We say hey, we don't have any competition. It's all Co-op petition and going back to the story where we beat Amazon by four days and others on our patents. We've got about over 90 patents either awarded or filed for both in the US and throughout the world. It's a very robust patent portfolio that we want to work with everyone. We think we unlock all this commerce for everybody. You know through your user agreement you're going to be granting overflight rights and on-site rights so when shippers want to work with us they're going to have all those rights granted to them because the people that are using our product want them to be able to access it. So there's a lot of things like that that we're going to unlock, streamline and just make it so much more efficient. Brent Peterson (09:31.79) Yeah, so mean, it does get quite complicated. And as I suppose as more autonomous systems arrive and more flight systems that we would have some sort of low level airspace problems. Is that something you're trying to address? Dan O'Toole (09:49.645) You know, we are not in that, that's FAA. They have all the flight lines are already established. A lot of them are. public access roads, public easements, utility easements at 400 feet is gonna be the typical altitude for our drone. if you did, like if you picked up your iPhone right now and said, show me all the airplanes in the sky right now, you'd be amazed. Hundreds of thousands, I mean, it's a staggering number. It's gonna be similar to that at a lower altitude. It's already formulated, it's happening right now. It's really not an issue. One of the things we are gonna be doing though is, We are going to be doing air traffic control, ground traffic control to our boxes. We'll be able to, through AI, streamline efficiencies. route scheduling, prioritization, capacity management, all those kind of things. And we are going to be bringing that. One of the things that has been obvious to us and not to a lot of others is as we've started this journey, we always believed that there would be a universal access point in the delivery ecosystem. We knew that dropping things on the ground was not a scalable option. And nobody else really thought about that. They all thought myopically about their own end-to-end solution. fine but there's a lot more things being delivered today than ever before and we see this kind of going the way of the Tesla Supercharger Network where that emerged as the standard. We think that we're going to be the standard. There's not going to be three arrive points in front of a home or business. There's going to be one and it's going to you know regulate and schedule all your inbound and outbound commerce so we're excited about that proposition. Brent Peterson (11:36.622) Yeah, that's interesting. You talked about the different arrive points. I know that I was in Montana this summer and I saw that the original railroads, a lot of times they built them side by side and they actually put two tunnels through a mountain side by side. So this really is solving a lot of problems. And do you feel like some of the things you're solving are accelerating faster than they would have done in the past because of maybe AI and some of the other things that are happening? Dan O'Toole (12:00.397) So COVID was a big accelerant, frankly, because so many people were displaced. That sped up the whole industry by 10 years, I would say. And then obviously AI is quickening every day. It's moving so fast, it's staggering. And we are leveraging that in a lot of ways. We came to, we were just invited by Nvidia. into their Connect program, which is quite validating for us. It calls attention to the fact that, you know, NVIDIA sees what we're doing and sees a value. you we, in one of the capacities and one of the products that they make available, the Thor card, we think we could be their biggest consumer of that product. So we're excited about where we're going and how we're getting there. Brent Peterson (12:47.904) And it sounds so you are addressing problems with not just flight but also ground based autonomous vehicles. Is that correct? Dan O'Toole (12:57.505) Yeah, it's important that we're agnostic and universal. We deliver the greatest user experience when everybody can play, right? And it goes back to the point where you can't take some of the items. You've got to be able to take them all. If you're starting to pick and choose, you're losing your value and the customer loses their value proposition. we wanted to, know, 99 per, I'm sorry, 91 % of all deliveries are five pounds or less. So that's, that's a huge number for us. And, and it really opens up all the autonomous delivery drone, know, we're about all those things fit very nicely into that delivery system. Brent Peterson (13:36.214) Are there other examples besides just like motorized delivery and air delivery that you're looking at or is that kind of like the antithesis of everything that people are trying to do? Dan O'Toole (13:49.571) You know, we, us mail, right? We're, we're, we're going for an approval process with the us postal service right now to get the postmaster general approval. Uh, it opens up all the federal easements for mailboxes for us. You know, there's a huge problem every day right now where checks are being stolen out of mailboxes at an alarming rate. You know, there's so much fraud out there. If what if you could disrupt that? What if, you know, average carrier say has 300 locations on his route. What if your phone was a fob? you know, some other unlock up, you know, that we would make available to you. And we would key the mailman or mailwoman's credentials. So all their 300 units when you get in proximity would unlock. You open up your mail door, put your item in, close it. You never knew it was locked. You never knew it locked behind you. You want when you get away, it locks. We have a report of that. If the mailman were terminated or something midday, we could turn off his credentials. lock him out. But you know, that's a big disruption to the fraud that we're seeing out there. So things like that we're envisioning. You know, funny thing is when you're the gateway to every home and business throughout the world with great connectivity doing what we're doing, the use cases are far and wide. And the majority of the things that we're going to ultimately do have yet to be thought of. You know, there's things like micro weather, traffic counting, pothole identification, real time traffic control, dead animals on the road. can be dispatched to municipalities. Tagging and tracking items if your car gets stolen, facial recognition for people and pets, shot spotter to determine the epicenter of a gunshot. We have an emergency light feature. If you have an emergency at your home, you pull up your arrive. you hit the 911 icon, says police fire ambulance. You pick the service you need, say you pick ambulance, you hit that, sends an automated dispatch to the ambulance dispatcher. At the same moment your ride point starts strobing red and white lights to denote ambulance. If it's a fire, it's red. If it's police, it's blue and red. So first responders immediately can find you. Maybe your neighbor finds you and you're in distress and they get there before first responders and say you're Dan O'Toole (16:07.78) Time is life, right? And these are things that we're thinking about and how we can give the highest perceived value to what we're doing so, you know, everybody can have a better quality of life. Brent Peterson (16:18.786) That's interesting. So are you addressing people that live in large apartment buildings and things like that as well? Dan O'Toole (16:25.058) We have a configuration on our roadmap for. virtually everyone, whether it's a somebody on a high rise in New York on a 35th floor, it could be a multifamily. It could be a residential or commercial use. We even have a portable unit envisioned for it could be on a tank in a military battlefield, RV, camper boat. It could be a commercial van where you have two painters at your house painting today, right? They run out of roller covers. What do they do right now? They both jump in the truck and leave for a couple hours on your What if you could seamlessly order a sleeve of roller covers from Sherwin-Williams? Keep working. You get a chime. You go out to your arrive point on your truck and grab the item. Keep working. That's productivity. That's value for the customer. All those kind of things. Brent Peterson (17:16.29) Yeah, and guess that does, if you're a commercial person in a truck, it does open up the possibility that you don't have a fixed location that a drone could come out to wherever you're at and help and deliver goods or services that you need, Dan O'Toole (17:30.722) Right, you we've done environmental, we've commissioned an environmental study about our product specifically. We know that for every 1 % of deliveries made to an arrive point, we take 3000 trucks off the road in the US. So it's a big impact. And then you've got all these byproducts of that impact. know, reduced traffic means less pollution, less wear and tear on the roads, less accidents, less deaths, lower insurance rates. It just goes on and on. These are all the quality of life issues. that we're going to deliver. I always say better, faster, fresher, cheaper, greener, and safer. Those are all elements that are going to be delivered through what we're doing. So we're really excited about that. Brent Peterson (18:12.59) What has been the funnest thing you've seen or the most fun thing you've seen or solution that you've come up with in terms of the autonomous deliveries? Dan O'Toole (18:24.108) You know, the funnest thing I would say, you know, just have, we, have. and drones we're working with. I mentioned Hancock Health. We dressed up the robot that we're working with in a Halloween costume and we actually delivered to all the kids and that was a huge hit. Things like that, those are the funnest. I love the word funnest. So thanks for using that. We have fun at everything we do. If you listen to our last two earnings calls, I started both of them out with a joke like you do. So we're having fun. That's our culture here. Brent Peterson (18:47.694) You Dan O'Toole (18:58.832) I have three goals. I want to be the boss that I would want to work for. I want this to be the company that I would want to work at and I want this to be the business that I would invest in. If we do those three things right every day, we're gonna be the best. Brent Peterson (19:13.518) And how do you see things playing out next year? Do you think that 2026 is going to be the year of accelerated, not just AI innovation and expansion, but more of the on the ground solutions that AI is helping to enable? Dan O'Toole (19:30.242) Yeah, it's going to be bigger and better than ever in the year after that, in the year after that and forever. It's, you know, in the U S alone, there's 170 million addresses. That number grows by 4,000 new addresses every single day. It's an evergreen, ever growing market, you know, where we are. We're focused on developing a one, uh, almost mil spec technology where, you know, our philosophy, has to work every time. Not some of the time, not most of the time we're in an industry where you're judging. by your failures, not your successes. People expect 100 % every single time and that's what we're going to deliver. And in doing that, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves by commissioning tens of thousands of units and putting them out there, knowing that they're essentially obsolete right now, going out the door. Right now, everything we're doing, we're not head down focused on delivering revenue or profitability. The ROI for us right now is the learnings and spooling that rapidly back into engineering and development to get the next generation best of the best and that's that's what we're doing so when we do press that button to scale it's going to be awesome. Brent Peterson (20:40.354) That's great, Dan. We have a few minutes left in the podcast. As I close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. But anything they'd like, what would you like to plug today? Dan O'Toole (20:48.802) You know, first of all, want to thank you and your subscribers for checking us out and the opportunity to be here. Thank you so much for that. I would say, you know, as a kid, my goal and dream was always to be at the head of a NASDAQ company. I always wanted to take a company public. It was a very nerdy thing. And the funny thing is I did it. To have a dream like that and have an opportunity that could deliver on that dream, I'm pitching myself every day. Prior to going public, we had 5,000 investors that shared the same vision with me. I love those guys. They all have my phone number. And if you invest in arrive AI, you are a co-owner in this company with me. All our stock is common shares with voting rights. It's all the same shares I have. I call us a we the people story. You're invited to come visit us anytime we have something that we want a decision on. We put it out as a vote to our shareholders. This is the, it goes back to what I said. you know, how do we be the company that I want to invest in? You know, when you're out there with a backdrop of Enron and Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman Freed, the default is always skepticism and I get that. But there are some great companies out here. I want to believe that we're one of them. I was, if you are an investor here, our promise is you're always going to hear the good, bad and the ugly here first. I own the ugly. I own the bad. The good takes care of itself. I will always own it. And that's what you get here. It's not always a great, this is the real world, right? But I do want to talk about my deal toy here too, Brett, you know, a kid in the candy store, still pinching myself, took our company public on May 15th. We rang the bell July 3rd at the NASDAQ. We had four people there we almost broke NASDAQ because they couldn't hardly hold for I don't think anybody's ever done that but this is the deal toy when you take a company public Dan O'Toole (22:44.298) It's a little tchotchke that your investment banker commissions on your behalf. Not many people know about them anymore. And it's kind of almost a thing of the past. But this thing right here embodies this whole journey that we've been on. it's Arrive AI, direct listing, ticker symbol, A-R-A-I, up to a $40 million pipe, which is a public or a private investment in a public equity. And that's what we have here. Maxim group want to give those guys a shout out arriving I We've got the drone delivering to one of our boxes here So anyway shameless plug if you're looking for a great company that cares about you if you missed out on Nvidia, Google, Amazon, all those guys and you kick yourself and you said next time I see something that resonates, you know, if you can see a future where autonomous delivery is happening, then you can see a future where Arrive AI is going to be at the center of that ecosystem. So that's it. I'm going to stop there. Brent, you're awesome. Thank you guys. Brent Peterson (23:50.83) That's great. Thanks. Dan O'Toole is the founder of Arrive AI. Thank you so much for being here today. Yeah. Absolutely. Go for it. Dan O'Toole (23:57.28) Hey, real quick, Brent, can you rate a joke for him? Can you rate a joke for him? Okay. What doesn't weigh very much and is blue? Brent Peterson (24:07.864) Haha, go on. Dan O'Toole (24:09.858) Light blue. I was gonna say, obviously it's a joke because everybody knows that light blue and blue weigh the same. Awesome, man. Awesome, buddy. Well, I cannot do that. I cannot do the host. I'm bringing you up to 14, man. Brent Peterson (24:11.214) That's all right, good one. Brent Peterson (24:19.299) Yes, no, get it. Yes. Thank you. I give it a 13. That's awesome. Thank you Thanks. Thanks, Dan Brent Peterson (24:29.146) I think you did not do me, thank you. right. Dan O'Toole, thank you so much for being here and thanks for the final joke. I appreciate it. Dan O'Toole (24:36.099) Thanks, Brian. We'll see you,