Dr J Rould
Full-Time Tech Investor, Quantum/Cybersecurity, Philosophy Background
Symbotic is not a long at about 72 times earnings. x.comÂ
Agility Robotics, via the Churchill Capital XI merger, is too early to own: it seeks a $2.5B valuation on an estimated $30-35M of trailing revenue. It is a really cool company, but no sure thing. x.comÂ
Symbotic has a strategic anchor in Walmart, which owns 13% of the company and has worked with it for years automating its distribution centers. The weekly chart looks great after earlier call buying. There is nothing with Amazon yet, but a deal there would be a major upside catalyst. x.comÂ
BOT, the robotics investment vehicle, looks built to capture dumb money riding robotics hype rather than to reward investors. It came to market at 5x NAV, still trades around 3.5x, charges a heavy ~3.6% annual fee and recruits crypto Twitter influencers, much like a Chamath-style SPAC. Toxic vehicles chasing robotics hype are likely to leave retail badly hurt, though such schemes can run hard until the music stops. x.com x.comÂ
Harmonic Drive Systems could lose its leading actuator position, since a rapidly growing market may need simpler products to scale, and its valuation is extremely high. x.comÂ
Symbotic is a high-upside automation play backed by its Walmart partnership. x.comÂ
CCXI should appreciate to unreasonable valuations because it is the only Western pure play on humanoid robots, through Agility Robotics. Despite the backlash, it still has meaningful blue-chip backing, and early, controversial platforms like this often command high multiples before production ramps, as photonics names did. It is early in the robotics cycle, and the aim is a double or more. x.com x.comÂ
Richtech Robotics showed all the red flags: under $10M in the bank while trying to sell AI robots, which takes hundreds of millions to do properly, heavy at-the-market dilution, a team with little experience, and customers presented as partnerships. x.comÂ
Symbotic is one of the stocks Wall Street is still underestimating, bringing AI-powered warehouse robotics at Walmart scale. x.comÂ
Palladyne AI offers software-layer asymmetry in robotics, as the controls software that tells a robot what to do once its hardware can move. At a $415 million market cap, it sells autonomy stacks built on a skill library trained on real-world robot demos to robot OEMs and defense contractors; hardware ships at a slope while software margins compound. The catalyst is its contract pipeline with the US Army and tier-one OEMs. It is a micro-cap, illiquid and concentrated in a single program. x.comÂ