Thrilled to finally talk about
@watneyrobotics.
Sean and I spent 90 minutes the first time we met talking about why ~every robotics startup has died to date. The priors were very bad. And yet I came out of that meeting a believer, and asking if there was *any way* we could invest.
@rgannon_ and Sean exemplify how I hope to operate. They are so good they overwhelm the priors:
1. Choose worthwhile missions
2. Free yourself from the prison of the mind
3. Make contact with the coal face
4. Maintain both belief & paranoia
1. Increase the speed and capacity of American industry, starting with data centers.
2. Decide you can, in fact, be a vendor to hyperscalers as a 10-person company. If you were right about problem importance and urgency, and you solve that problem, much conventional wisdom about big customers can be ignored.
3. Identify whatever problem prevents progress — model, data, security, networking, contracting, hardware, ROI math, politics, and attack it furiously. As
@Alfred_Lin would say, they know how to be “heat-seeking missiles for pain.”
4. Ryan is exceptionally good at continually testing his own beliefs, and then is (or at least seems) very comfortable being unreasonable and contrarian. From building a mock datacenter in a week, to convincing people to leave their jobs and homes for an international supply chain tour-of-duty, to taking non-consensus technical bets — I trust no one as much to figure out what needs to be done, assume it is possible in the next two weeks, and then convince the team to do it in one. The guy has a screw loose.
We’ve raised $80 million in Series A funding, co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, with continued participation from Conviction, Abstract, A*, and Grant Gordon. This brings our total raised to over $100 million.
We started Watney by asking a simple question -- what can a robot enable in industries where the work remains valuable on an infinite horizon? We found an answer in the fundamental inputs to civilization: energy, matter, and intelligence.
A robot will never be as charming as a barista or as personable as a housekeeper, but it can be more exacting than a surgeon. And, a breakthrough in one quickly becomes the capability of millions. We don’t imitate human motions or processes. We care about the new, differentiated capabilities robots can unlock. We work on problems where our choice of embodiment gives us an order of magnitude advantage, whether through precision, reliability, or scale.
Compute is just beginning to transform society, but it’s constrained by execution. Since 2025, Watney has been serving the largest hyperscalers in the world, helping accelerate their compute rollout through an end-to-end deployment model.
Across hundreds of thousands of hours in customer facilities, our systems have achieved more than four nines of reliability. They’ve enabled our customers to build data centers faster, at larger scales, and with more ambitious architectures. Today, we operate the largest fleet of dexterous robots running 24/7/365 across the United States.
This is all to say, it's an exciting time at Watney. We’re all here because we want to see more ambition in the physical world. We are hiring across all domains. Join us.