Building The Backbone Of Autonomous Delivery

We look our Arrive Ai shareholders in the eye, lay out eight months of real progress, and bring in our tech lead to explain how a software-first platform becomes the backbone for autonomous delivery. The build is accelerating toward end-to-end demos, with major partners leaning in.

• eight-month milestones from hiring to HQ and NVIDIA Connect
• why the share price lags execution
• team depth across robotics, vision, data, and DevOps
• software-first architecture for an Arrive OS
• vendor selection with NXP, Qualcomm, AMD
• simulation, benchmarking, and cloud AI tooling
• vision for a distributed data center at the edge
• power, connectivity, and iterative hardware trade-offs
• converging workstreams toward end-to-end prototypes
• CES momentum and upcoming events in India, healthcare, and finance

Call us at 317-694-7520

Hosted by Dan O'Toole

Transcript

Opening And Shareholder Message

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another Dan Show. Hey Dan.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hey, Kyla. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_02 0:08

I'm doing great. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:10

I'm great. I'm great. Hey, I wanted to call this today. I wanted to look our shareholders in the eye and say, hey, here we are.

SPEAKER_02 0:18

We're still thriving, still surviving, and still getting better every single day.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Hey, one cool thing on today's Dan show. We're going to have Doug in here, right?

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Yes, Doug Heinlein. He is our tech lead, um, platform developer. He's brilliant. He's gonna sit down with us and talk about some of the uh big things that we're working on here behind the scenes. Um that's kind of hard to talk about a lot of times, but he does a great job.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

He does a great job, let's let him do it. But we want you to see what's really going on behind the scenes. So look forward to Doug here

Eight Months Public: Milestones

SPEAKER_01 0:48

in a couple minutes. But first, I wanted to say the share price. It it's it's in our face, right? Um, nobody, I'm not gonna say I'm not diminishing anybody else when I say this, but nobody cares about the share price more than I do. Number one, I'm the initiator of the company. Uh everyone invested as much for the idea as they did me. And I I don't say that like from an ego standpoint. What I say, what I mean is I take it very personally. Everyone that put a dime into this company, I feel like I was part of that decision, and I don't want to ever let that down. I'm also the largest shareholder in the company, and I would never intentionally turn this, you know, business into a head on into a wall or anything like that, right? We're doing everything we can every day to execute. Um, and I just want to step back and say we've been public for about eight months, right? If you look at what we've done in eight months, we've you know we're over 40 employees. Um we've moved into a new world world-class headquarters, Fisher's Indiana. We've uh um entered into a con a um um NVIDIA. What am I trying to say?

SPEAKER_02 1:54

Oh, we went to the NVIDIA Connect program. We were entered into that, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

We've gone into the NVIDIA Connect program and are utilizing it daily. Every day. We've got some of the most cutting-edge equipment and platforms available anywhere in the world, right here in this building. We have huge tech uh computing power, uh, some of the biggest in the area. Uh and then we've got IP that continues to uh be generated and issued to us, intellectual property. Um, we're coming out with new products, uh, new features, benefits. We're rolling out uh in new areas, we're showcasing it. Uh we've got a lot going on that we're moving so fast. And I just I used to think that the market was a leading indicator. You could look at it and see where things were going. But after seeing how our stock has been treated, I feel like it's a lagging indicator because I don't feel like it is giving us credit for everything that's happening here. You know, these are my own views, forward-looking statements, whatever you want to say. Um, did I ever think that I'd see the shares this low? No, I didn't. In fact, I just recently bought more, right? Uh check the filing that's out there. But um anyway, I just I wanted to come on and say, hey, um you guys know my number, 317-694-7520. Um, if you're an early investor or a new one, uh, I celebrate that. You know, the the what we've done is exceptional. Going from a crowdfunded company to the NASDAQ, it's it's never been done before the way we've done it. And if you believe in the journey of how we got here and where we are, and that autonomous delivery is going to happen at scale, then then we're the infrastructure that's gonna make all that happen, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Yeah, and it's being built right now, which is why we wanted to invite Doug in on this conversation to explain really how it's being built and the team that's behind the building of it. That's right. So let's bring Doug in.

Introducing Tech Lead Doug Heinlein

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Let's get Doug.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Let's introduce you to bring this out of the mud and get get Doug in Harrow.

SPEAKER_02 3:47

Welcome, Doug. We're excited to have you on the Dan show.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Glad to be here. Doug, I'm I'm happy you're on our team. Yeah, you're you're a helpful guy. Great to have you, man.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Yeah, good leader, a good communicator, uh, great personality. I mean, you bring all of it, but then there's a lot going on up here too, just like a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Hey, I wanted Doug to come on because I want people that are investors and every everyday people are getting to know us. I want them to see what's happening kind of behind the scenes. And you're great at what you do, and you can tell them what your role is, but you're also great at articulating that, and that's that's rare. So I value that.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

I really appreciate that. I think that's high praise.

Team Depth And Capabilities

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Yeah. So uh my name is Doug Heinlein. I am the tech lead for the platform team here at Arrive AI. Uh, I run the team that is the core software engineers behind the next gen uh product line. Uh, it also includes the data engineering team and the roboticists and vision uh vision teams. Uh so we're in the thick of it building the next uh platform. Uh we really are going to be pushing forward the future of multimodal uh delivery and robotics. Uh it's really exciting. There's hardly any technology that we don't touch on a daily basis. Everything from sort of web standard web dev uh app development uh to GIS systems, to machine learning, to robotics, kinematics, motion planning, uh you name it, and we are uh diving deep. So that's great. Hey, talk about the team around you that we've built here at Arrive.AI.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Uh absolutely amazing. So why don't you contrast that with your experience, like what you've seen in other opportunities?

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Just want people to know that. The first and most noticeable thing is just the amazing spectrum of uh professional skill sets, is the first thing that's most striking. So we have a team that's composed of some of the best engineers from uh, you know, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, systems engineering. We have uh people that specialize in algorithmic optimization. We have uh some of the best um sort of DevX, DevOps kind of uh solutions engineers. We have amazing uh experience in terms of scaling large data systems. Um we have the ability to build uh large-scale pipeline for AI use cases as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Over 100 years of AI experience, right, Kylan?

SPEAKER_02 6:03

Yes, we have hundreds of years of development experience in all the different arms that he's talking about, but specifically with an AI, yeah, about 100 years' experience.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Well, and I didn't even finish my list. So we also have there's more? Yeah, there's more. Wait, there's more. Uh so we also have uh roboticists and vision experts as well. So I literally there's no like bleeding edge technology that we don't have a high aptitude for internally in our team. Um and we're also building in uh the infrastructure that will allow a team like that to really sing, and these things take a little sort of a flywheel where it takes time for it to get going. Um, but we have in-house ability for um building and training our own machine learning algorithms and optimizing those algorithms for our use cases. So a lot of AI teams, they will sort of go on Hugging Face or another uh environment and pull down a uh uh uh model and what you see is what you get, and that's kind of they hope that it solves their problem. There's no limit to the actual applications that we can build in-house here at Arrive. Um, and that's one thing that I think is a little bit different for a company uh like ours, is just the raw capacity to do really sort of uh groundbreaking and bleeding edge

Software-First Architecture And Arrive OS

SPEAKER_00 7:12

work.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

Yeah, I was gonna say, talk about it's a greenfield project. We're taking a software first approach, right? Absolutely. Let's talk about what that means and how that's different.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Yeah, so software first it kind of means a little different things to different people. For us, it really comes down to uh sort of first principles thinking in the software space. So designing around uh architecture and security and uh proper design patterning from the start. So a lot of times you'll you'll start with uh an engineering problem where you get fixated on specific applications uh and then you kind of muddle through something that remains scalable and cost-effective. Um, focusing on software first means that we can adopt the best technologies with the best security, with the best uh columns and uh throughput, uh, and that becomes the backbone for a system that you can build any kind of application that you want. Uh so we're really thinking about building a true arrive OS kind of environment where it's our operating system with the very best and modern standards of software application design and architecture design.

SPEAKER_02 8:15

So a lot of the team have been here. Um, I guess a few people started before we moved out of LaunchFissures and made it to the building, but now we've got some 40 plus people. And I was talking to DJ yesterday and I said, you know, are you where you thought you would be as far as progress and development?

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Who's DJ and what's he do?

SPEAKER_02 8:35

Well, that's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Uh DJ is our uh senior platform engineer, so he's sort of uh um my better half in the uh engineering side of the organization. So he's driving uh the main design around our Rust-based Arrive OS for the embedded system.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

So um, but his answer was we're leaps and bounds ahead of anywhere I could have imagined we would be. That was like he was he was giddy. I mean, he was so excited.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Well, as a tech lead, I always want to be a little farther than where we are. But uh it's yeah, it's high praise coming from him too. He's an outstanding engineer, one of the best I've ever worked with. So it's uh coming from him, that means quite a lot. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

And you guys are having fun back there. I mean, developing something brand new.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

I know you don't want to hear it's almost too much fun. Uh you can never have too much fun to kill with that, Doug. Well, I mean, we're we're we're in the thick of doing a lot of uh benchmarking on different provider hardware. So we're doing a lot of vendor selection right now. Um, and when you're a nerdy tech kind of guy, when a manager walks over and hands you a new prototype dev kit and says run it through its paces,

Tools, Benchmarks, And Vendor Selection

SPEAKER_00 9:35

you get a big grin, right? So everybody back there is really happy, right? I wouldn't know.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

Don't you have dreams about that? I wouldn't know.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

No, but I believe you. That's why we're glad you're here. Hey, talk about coming off CES, some of the big opportunities that are in front of us, some of the biggest companies in the world. Well, so I really want to convey the fact that this is not vapor where what we're doing here is real, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Yeah, absolutely. So I don't want to say it's surprising. Actually, it's quite what I expected. You know, um, there's hardly a chipmaker that we've talked to that doesn't sort of love the concept of what we're trying to achieve. Uh, you know, obviously you're you're in the sales process, so everyone wants to be your best friend, but there's legitimate interest from a technology and technical standpoint for like the solution engineering side as well with these companies. So we've been talking to NXP and Qualcomm and directly to AMD and some others, uh, and trying to understand what are the different solutions, the strengths and weaknesses and costs and supply chain issues with with all of the different product lines. Um, sort of unanimously across the board when we explain to them the vision of what we're doing and the zonal architecture that we're putting together, the kinds of um design considerations that we're bringing to bear on our process, um, it's unanimously received well. Um, and they're excited about what we're doing.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

One of the cool things, you know, you're always coming up with new things as you develop what your roadmap is. And one of the cool things that I see emerging is this idea of a distributed data center. We all know data center usage and what's going on out there and clamoring for resources. And then talk a little bit about what that opportunity could look like for arrive.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

So, this is a fascinating concept. You figure all this is the nature of the sort of the AIOT space, which I think we're definitely in, um, maybe the front line of that. Um, you

CES Momentum And Chipmaker Interest

SPEAKER_00 11:23

we went through a stage where we started making devices smarter and smarter, and as the IoT revolution, we're kind of getting to the point now when now that machine learning and AI is being embedded in those IoT, you're actually having intelligence wired into things. Um, when we look at what we're doing, um we really have the opportunity to build in a little bit of capability that is room for growth, right, is one way of looking at it. So overspecking things a little bit, and eventually you can imagine a future where there are tens of thousands of our devices all around the United States who are doing many things. They're listening to the environment, they're watching for safety reasons, they're they're doing smart city applications. But generally speaking, unless the the robotic element, the interaction element is in play, they're idled down, right? There's resources available. Um, they're all going to be networked together with the highest level of security that we can achieve, uh, which

Vision For A Distributed Data Center

SPEAKER_00 12:15

means that we can uh capitalize on that compute uh capability uh as a distributed network. Um really the sky's the limit. The kinds of applications that we can build on top of that are wild to think about.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

One of the things I always say is you know, when you've got this new platform, you're the gateway to every home and business throughout the world, you create connectivity. There's more use cases we don't know about what we're gonna do than we do now. That's what's exciting for me every day. And coming up with things like the distributed data center, we know what that means in the market today. And the fact that we might have the opportunity to become that and and set that tone for the market, it's it's really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Yeah, and usually the the use case that kind of clicks with people is you say like mine Bitcoin, because everyone kind of understands right. But the things that I'm more interested in are, you know, we could even make this network available for like research purposes or scientific research, especially. Uh anything that requires a lot of just general compute. Sure. Um, it's just fascinating to think though. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:13

So where are we getting that power from?

SPEAKER_00 13:15

So that's a very interesting question. So all of these design constraints have trade-offs, right? So um one of the things we have to look at with our device is power consumption. That's one, and another one is connectivity. So nothing is nothing in the universe that involves physics is free. Um, so there's a series of trade-offs. Obviously, as we get through the process of designing this, little by little we will improve upon all aspects of its performance from a power management perspective, uh, as well as you know, how noisy of a device it is, for lack of a better way of describing it. Um, but there's lots of things that can be brought to bear in in sort of the the manufacturing and the DFM design process that'll allow us to get better at that over time, especially. Um, because there's a there's a motion part of what we do, uh, that is also sort of costly from a power management perspective as well. Um a 50-pound thing is always gonna weigh 50 pounds. There's no way that I can come up with software

Power, Trade-Offs, And Iteration

SPEAKER_00 14:10

to fix that problem. Uh attach helium to it. Okay, yeah, yeah. Uh we haven't thought of that one. Maybe we'll try it. Uh so it's gonna be one of those where over time it's gonna get better and better and better. Um, we are in an early RD Skunkworks prototype stage. Uh, so I can't promise that the first device is gonna be the most efficient thing you've ever seen. Um, but I can pretty much promise that every time we revise it, it will get better and better and better. And people will be surprised, I think, where we can get to.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

And I guess the thing too, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but how um each specialty engineer has been working in, I mean, they work together, but rather siloed in their specialty. And this week you're seeing them come together, which seems to be a pretty exciting moment.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah, and it uh it warms the heart. I can't uh even communicate how proud of this team I am. We we came together, we were all on boarded almost simultaneously, which which at the time seems slightly crazy, if I might admit it. Uh, but they've really come together. And I think when you are presented with a very large vision, the first part is to try to figure out what are the individual sort of streams of development that need to happen to achieve that goal. What's that storm form and norm? Storm form and norm, yeah, as Mark says. Uh we've been storming. We've definitely been storming. Uh so if you think about our project, we have the robotics embedded system, we have uh the big data application layer, and sort of the getting ready to have supercharged AI use cases on the backside, and then we have the the uh marketplace network concept that we're building.

Converging Workstreams And End-To-End Demos

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Uh, and then there's also another sort of task set, which is sort of third-party IoT management, so like almost fleet management kind of stuff. Um, all of those have sort of been running concurrently, and different different uh resources on the team have been working on them uh at the you know, as as we're able to spec them and scope them. Um we're kind of getting to the point in the next two to four weeks where those projects are gonna start merging back up and we're gonna have end-to-end pipelines for some use cases working on prototypes. Um that really changes the game.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Hey, send us out with a little tease about something, some victory or some big win that you're seeing. Something exciting. Share with some inside baseball.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

Uh so the big wins, well, so there's the sort of the macro environment in our space. Um, one of the things that's fascinating as a manager, and it's hard to keep up with, frankly, because the the rate of changes accelerate so much is just the tools that we're able to bring to bear in our space.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Not the NVIDIA stuff or well, not just so across the board.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

So, you know, we we use NVIDIA Omniverse stack, we're doing a lot of stuff heavy on the simulation side, but also just in the general AI space, you know, we're we're we're tooling up around AI, um AI in every way imagine. We're using a lot of cloud back there, aren't we? Yeah, so we we're heavy on anthropic. Um, claude has been amazing. We we're building out infrastructure around that. So it's you know, everyone likes to talk about a 10x engineer. I make the argument you don't really have 10x

Simulation, AI Tools, And Team Velocity

SPEAKER_00 17:14

engineers, you build 3x, 5x teams, and it's all around adopting the best tools and and remaining um forward-looking. That's one thing I would say is is quite amazing with this team because we have the the skill sets and aptitudes that people can see its value and actually leverage it properly.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

And how has Arrive, how have we done it as far as keeping you out on allowing you to get the right tools and things? How do you feel like you got the right environment?

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and actually we're you know, we were being encouraged to adopt the latest and greatest and stay current, right? Um, so that would be one thing I would flag. The other thing is just like I was saying before, there's there's you know, uh uh winning is contagious, the way I describe it. So the fact that for the first time we're gonna start being able to demo end-to-end concepts of sort of almost the entire life cycle of what we're gonna ask to build, is it's just gonna motivate people like you've never seen. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Yeah, hey Doug, thanks for coming in time. Appreciate it. We always love talking to you. That's Doug Heinlein. Thank you, Doug.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

Real deal. Real deal here.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

See you soon, buddy.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

Thanks. Thanks, Doug. Pretty impressive.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Doug, Doug's amazing, right? I'm the Doug Show.

SPEAKER_02 18:21

The Doug Show. We should have a I'm gone, guys.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Bye.

SPEAKER_02 18:25

Um, but we do want to just we have so many milestones. You mentioned a lot of them earlier.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

I want to be

Bold Goals, Events, And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 18:31

a billion-dollar company this year. That's my whisper goal. Why can't we make it to a billion? If you can be at a million, you can be at a billion, right? So we've got some big things happening, and I'm driven to get us there. I think the number's 2933 a share. I think I did some math. So if we get to 2933 a share or thereabouts, we're a billion-dollar company. I think I think it's doable in this market. So um, let's let's let's all move toward that, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:57

Yeah. And to get to that valuation, we're building relationships every day. It was a huge success at CES. So many meetings. It was some 20 meetings with giant players in the industry. They're all coming here to visit us, they're visiting us one by one, and they're incredibly impressed with our team we're building. Um, that was just one thing. We have the India.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Hey, what's impactful? Tell us something impactful.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

We have an India AI impact summit.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

I knew it was I knew it was gonna be impactful.

SPEAKER_02 19:29

Yeah, NVIDIA. Uh NVIDIA's there.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

So Jensen's gonna hang out.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

Jensen's there.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Jensen Wong. You guys know him, CEO of NVIDIA. Yeah, Prime Minister Modi.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

He'll be speaking on Tuesday.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Okay. Um, and we're gonna have an arrive point there.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

We will have an arrive point there. Who else is gonna be there for Autonomy and Sky Air, but on our team we have Robert Rex and Kieran Paul. So Kieran Paul is uh our director of strategy in the Kieran, yes, Kieran Paul. Uh he is in India, he's from India, and he is there, so he is our boots on the ground in that region of the world.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

And I'm just teasing this. They're not driving this there, but this is our new van that uh is coming out soon. So we got to keep moving here.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

It's underway, yeah. So that's one exciting thing. We've got Hymns Conference coming up, which is a big healthcare conference uh in Las Vegas.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

When is that? March.

SPEAKER_02 20:18

That is in March 9th through 12th.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

We have the Roth Conference, uh uh Capital Market Conference in uh in uh San Diego.

SPEAKER_02 20:26

Yeah, we're hitting all the branches. We've got sales marketing, we've got just got back from Atlanta this week.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

We went to some major players down there, we've got some big stuff coming on that. Stay tuned there. Yeah. Doug was great. Thanks for making this happen, everybody, and you two. And I think that's it, right? That's it. Let's wrap it.