Last month we put out an investor update and want to share the news on our website as well. Lots of things spinning at Ally. First, it’s exciting to share that Ally hit a significant milestone this week – we brought in revenue for the first time! The money came in for our current integration project. With Packaging Systems, one of our partnership companies, we are designing and building an automated packing station. Stay tuned as we share progress on this project!

Regarding Ally-at large, our two current areas of focus:

1. Working on automation integration projects to help build our portfolio, continue to gain customer insight on needs, support our product development and keep our team intact by bringing in revenue.
2. Working on our next product.

In our last post we mentioned our partnership with Doosan Robotics. That relationship continues and we have a number of arms lined up to be utilized in integration projects, including the auto packing station. Ally is an official Preferred Doosan System Integrator. We are thankful to be working with a great robotic arm company and one that allows us to work on bringing automation to anyone, anywhere.

Our other significant partnership is with a company called Packaging Systems. Packaging Systems has been operating within the packaging industry for over 35 years. Ally enables them to expand their product offerings into automation products. While their focus is packaging, the foundational technology developed here has direct application into the construction and food service industries.

A larger discussion on Ally’s product pivot and our new industry focus, the construction industry:

From the beginning, Ally has been about general-purpose tasks and automation. We started our journey focusing on food service because we were a subsidiary of a food service company. Now that we are no longer a subsidiary, we will continue to deliver on food service automation, as within it we have significant domain expertise, IP and customer opportunities, but we’ll be pivoting and focusing on the construction industry.  

Unlike construction, other industries have seen immense increases in productivity where they’ve been able to adopt automation. Often these industries have a “high volume with low mix” of tasks (same thing, over and over – think automotive). But on the typical construction jobsite, the jobs intrinsically have a very high mix of tasks, which has historically made automation difficult to deploy. As the trades continue to struggle to find people who want to do the difficult, dirty, and dangerous tasks, the challenges facing the construction industry are stacking up. With Ally’s vision of automation for anyone, anywhere, we believe it is pertinent for Ally to focus on construction autonomy moving forward. Ally is working with DRP Construction, a premier general contractor and industry leader, to define a construction autonomy product roadmap.

We think there is an opportunity to significantly improve construction industry productivity with targeted automation. To start, the electrician trade aligns well to general-purpose autonomy – electricians are typically on a jobsite from start to finish (high robot utilization), electricians tend to show eagerness to adopt tools that work, many electricians would work further into their careers if some of the manual burden could be reduced, and there are over 762k electricians in the US with over 72k current openings. Fractional productivity improvements, within particular tasks an electrician performs, quickly add up to hundreds of millions of dollars in opportunity. We believe there’s a significant opportunity and high value to develop an “Electrician Buddy” – a system that improves electrician safety, reduces fatigue, provides inspection, acts as a knowledge base, and performs tasks. We’ll share more details soon!

Although we haven’t been as vocal about it, we have also been continuing our work on our custom actuators and motor drivers. These are both designed with the robotics industry in mind – designed and developed to be utilized in the robotic arm we were building and planned to be utilized in integration projects. Ultimately, we’d love to see these in the hands of others who have hardware needs – stay tuned for a future update.

As we hit the end of April, we are working simultaneously on our controls, integration projects and determining our entrance into the construction industry. We’ll post another update in the coming weeks. Please check us out on LinkedIn for the smaller updates.