‍

Raising on Your Terms: Lessons from Robotics Founders Who Took Control of Their Capital Strategy

Raising capital for a robotics company is a different game. You are building something ambitious, often physical, with complex timelines and significant upfront costs. Most investors are used to SaaS. They expect quick returns, lightweight infrastructure, and scalable revenue models. Robotics founders don’t fit that mold and the panelists from our latest webinar are proud of that.

‍

Rich Hull of Miso Robotics, Buck Jordan of Vebu Labs, and Hiten Sonpal of RISE Robotics joined us for a focused discussion on what it actually takes to scale a robotics company with retail capital. These leaders have raised tens of millions online, backed by strategic partners and large retail communities, while maintaining control over their vision and growth.

‍

Retail capital has given them a unique edge. Miso Robotics has over 40,000 investors who are not just financial backers, but active participants in the company’s momentum. As Rich shared in the webinar, building a strong community of investors creates real brand equity. People recognize Flippy, their signature product, across the country. That kind of visibility is earned; not bought through paid ads or institutional checks.

‍

For Hiten and the team at RISE Robotics, a single insight shifted everything. Suppliers and engineers were asking to invest after seeing the product firsthand. That organic interest confirmed what the team suspected, there was a broader base of believers who saw the long-term potential. By opening up access, they turned early excitement into real capital.

‍

This approach is not just about replacing traditional fundraising. It is about building a smarter capital stack. Buck Jordan emphasized the value of running a community round alongside institutional outreach. With retail capital, you have a scalable, predictable path to traction. It is not reliant on a single partner, a warm intro, or a narrow window of interest. It is a strategy you can build, measure, and refine over time.

‍

There are still misconceptions about online capital raising, especially in deep tech and hardware. But the truth is clear: founders who are thoughtful about brand, storytelling, and communication are unlocking capital from investors who believe in the mission. And that capital comes with benefits: increased visibility, stronger engagement, and a growing network of advocates.

‍

This conversation is a must-watch for founders building in robotics, frontier tech, or any category where the traditional venture path feels misaligned. You will hear directly from founders who have built lasting companies without compromising control.

‍

Transcript

‍

Jon Stidd: Welcome everybody. We're gonna wait a couple of minutes past the hour here to go live, give everybody a chance to join, so please hang tight.

‍

We'll start at 3 after.

‍

And as we get queued up here, everybody will see the public chat over to the right. We're gonna save some time on the back end of this to do a little Q&A, so please go ahead and um drop any questions in there. Yeah, feel free to give a shout out where you're from. I see some Chicago and Dallas and Scottsdale tuning in.

‍

Louisiana, right on.

‍

And we'll start in just another minute here.

‍

Greg, thank you. Are you, you're hearing an echo there?

‍

Turn off my volume on the 2nd device.

‍

Book in the game. Can you guys hear me OK? Any echo? Great, fantastic. All right, let's go ahead and get started here. I want to give a warm welcome to everybody joining, tuning in from all across the globe here as I can see in the chat. My name is Jon Stidd and I'm the chief growth officer here at DealMaker. I'm excited to be moderating today's panel, uh, session on raising capital in robotics. How you scale your vision on your terms. So, If you're here, you probably already know it's hard to raise capital when you're building something ambitious, especially if it involves hardware and robotics.

‍

Fortunately, these panelists didn't follow that standard playbook, and they're here to talk about it. They didn't wait around for institutional funding. They built powerful brands, raised millions from retail investors, and scaled companies on their terms. So today you're going to hear what that actually looks like and how to do it.

‍

Before we jump in fully, a quick disclaimer, this is not legal advice or business advice. We do not recommend any issuer. You should not act upon any information from this presentation without seeking professional advice from your trusted advisors. These opinions represent the opinions of our speakers only and not any entity in the DealMaker group, so. With that, let's get underway. I want to start with a quick round of intros so everyone in the audience can put faces to names here, and understand the perspectives you're each bringing to the table. I'll, uh, I'll call on each of you for a quick, uh, intro around here, just, you know, let us know who you are, what your company does, and, uh, maybe one thing you're excited to talk about today. So, uh, Buck, let's start with you, then we'll do Rich and Hitton.

‍

Buck Jordan: My name is Buck Jordan from Vebu.

‍

Uh, we build robust restaurants, primarily around point solutions. Uh, we're best known for the avocado, which cuts cores and peels, avocados for Chipotle. Uh, so we got a lot of guac around here.

‍

Um, we really understand restaurants, uh, what the, the labor in the back of restaurants, uh, better than most, most brands because a lot of brands, um, and most companies, but a lot of brands invite us into the back of house to study every minute of labor. Uh, the output, the output of that is that we get to um identify places where we can inject automation to, um, Uh, create ROI for these brands, and, you know, so primarily we've been focused on, uh, point solutions, and the best known one that we're doing is the Avocado.

‍

Uh, we're also working on some more generalized robotic solutions, um, you know, trying to bring humanoids into the back of house and kitchens, but also the supply chain of, of, of, uh, restaurant supply chains like agriculture.

‍

Um, so happy to be here. I've been working with DealMaker since the beginning, I think, uh, and so thank you very much.

‍

Rich Hull:And then I'll, I'll jump in, I guess. I think I'm next. So, uh, I'm Rich Hull, I'm the CEO of Miso Robotics.

‍

Buck, uh, of course, left out one very important part of his resume.

‍

He was a founder of Miso and is a, uh, friend of Miso, a shareholder of Miso, supporter of Miso, and so forth. And so we too operate in the restaurant technology space.

‍

We are, uh, working on modernizing the kitchen.

‍

Uh, in restaurants, uh, similar to what, uh, some of the things that Buck has going on.

‍

And, um, our signature product is named Flippy Fry Station. He is, uh, that's become a very famous robot.

‍

Uh, he cooks everything you would ever want to cook at the fry station. He's operating in, uh, live kitchens around the country and quick serve restaurants, Jack in the Box, White Castle, and some others, and, uh, and he's really You know, uh, the leader in the space, and is a was a first mover in kitchen automation and um it's been around for about 10 years, and Flippy has just moved into his 3rd generation, which is generally the 3rd generation is the, the, the generation of any new product that scales and so we're now seeing that scaling and that's what I was brought in to do. I'm fairly new to Miso.

‍

Uh, I was brought in by Buck, the board and uh one of our large investors, Ecolab, and Ecolab, for those who don't know, is a $70 billion public company that sells cleaning solutions to probably every restaurant you've ever been in. So I just had a big exit on my last company.

‍

And was leaving the acquire and uh and got a call from Buck and Ecolab, and here I am. So I am not an engineer by training. I've learned a lot over the last couple of years.

‍

I love being on the leading edge of AI, but I know how to grow companies and create exits.

‍

Jon Stidd: Thank you, Rich.

‍

I guess I'll go next.

‍

Hiten Sonpal: Uh, my name is Hiten Sonpall. I'm the CEO of RISE Robotics.

‍

Um, RISE Robotics is electrifying heavy machinery.

‍

Well, what we're doing is we have this core technology called Beltdraulic.

‍

We've taken hydraulic cylinders, taken the liquid out of them, replaced them with belts and pulleys, and ended up with something that's 3 times as fast, 3 times as efficient, and has built in health monitoring, position sensing, and all the things that you need to make an autonomous solution.

‍

Uh, so very excited about that. This is my 3rd role, uh, either as a CEO or Uh, president of a company, uh, like Rich, uh, I'm not the founder, I'm new to the company and, uh, I've been here for a year and what I'm trying to do is to take this company from uh being primarily an engineering company, uh, doing research now to a product company. So it's a very exciting time at RISE Robotics, this transition where we're going from prototypes to production units.

‍

Um, the, the, the Beltdraulic technology that I was talking about, the cylinders, you can see the red cylinder in the background, that big cylinder that, that's, that's there.

‍

Uh, that thing can lift, uh.

‍

50,000 pounds, so 22 tons.

‍

So we've got some really big and heavy equipment.

‍

And then one thing I share in common with Rich is that Buck and I also go way back and Buck's tried to hire me a couple of times into one of his portfolio companies. It hasn't worked out yet, but maybe soon.

‍

Buck Jordan: I'll try.

‍

One of the best.

‍

Jon Stidd: That's why we've got you on today.

‍

Uh, well, thank you guys. That's certainly a wealth of experience, right, that uh we want to share with the audience today. You'll have some insights into how you built companies, right? A lot of this is about rethinking the capital stack, you know, robotics companies, they don't scale like SaaS, it's capital intensive. It can be slow to generate revenue and potentially hard to explain to investors, right? So because of that, you know, traditional funding routes like VC and institutional capital can be challenging. Um, some founders would have given up. All three of you are here because you've carved a different path and built, you know, a funding strategy around your vision. So I want to dive into that a little bit. And Rich, we'll start with you, you know, as you mentioned with Flippy there, your star product, uh, Miso sits at this intersection of hardware, AI, and food automation. Um, so, you know, that can be a lot for any given investor. How do you think about making that story accessible, investable to a general audience, right? Is the, how does the everyday investor sort of interpret that story that you're trying to tell?

‍

Rich Hull: Yeah, we do sit at that intersection, as you mentioned between hardware and software and specifically AI software and uh I like that. Honestly, if you look at the success stories in that space, obviously some of those have gone on to just become household names, you know, Waymo, SpaceX, Apple, and for investors, I think that collision of those two worlds creates differentiator returns, which is very attractive to a lot of investors.

‍

I'd say, you know, kind of my uh perspective on tapping into retail capital for a company like ours was actually formed long before I got here.

‍

So my last company um which I was also a founder of, uh, it's the ViX streaming service, which is today the largest Spanish language streaming service in the world, did about a billion dollars of revenue last year and we sold that about 4 years ago.

‍

Um, and the original name of that streaming service was called Pongalo, which in Spanish means like put it in, like put in the tape and play it.

‍

And uh, you know, Buck was on my cap table. He learned a lot very early on about uh crowdfunding and called one day and said, if you don't do this, you're crazy.

‍

And the more I looked into it, the more it made sense for me because especially with a consumer facing business like what we had at ViX, you know, it was for me kind of a similar strategy to the way people raise money for bars and restaurants. You know, you generally don't take, uh, $100 from one guy, you take $1 from 100 guys. And that way you get this army of marketers that goes out there and runs around and tells their friends about this restaurant you own, right? And no, I can always get in and I can always get a table and like that's your word of mouth marketing army. And I think when I came to Miso, while they had already started their crowdfunding journey and Miso raised more than $100 million it's one of the most successful equity crowdfunding stories out there, maybe the most successful, I'm not even sure.

‍

Um, you know, I think we've taken a similar approach and we kind of view that army of marketers and Miso's got 40,000 retail investors as part of our secret sauce.

‍

We use that to go and evangelize the brand, and I think consequently Miso probably has the most valuable brand in all of restaurant technology, maybe all of food technology, because it's so well known. So much capital has been used to just go out and, you know, market the brand, but then the investors themselves go and extend that brand, and I think that's a really valuable asset. I, last summer I was with my kids in a small town in Montana that doesn't even have a stoplight, and I was sitting at a playground talking to some local dad and told him about Miso and Flippy, and he goes, oh, I, I know Flippy, and that's a very common experience. In fact, that's the majority of the experiences I have and all of that is simply because of the brand equity that was built through the, you know, investor base that we got through retail crowdfunding.

‍

Jon Stidd: Wonderful. Yeah, I mean that's the beauty of, uh, of the brand, right, and something Flippy, that's very visual and visceral, right? And then, you know, leveraging digital to get that word out there. That's, uh, that Montana story is great. Um, it's for you, right? So, you know,

‍

Buck Jordan: oh, yeah, sorry about that. I mean, you know, sorry I cut you off, but like, um, you know, um.

‍

I think that Miso and especially Miso, while Rich has been been operating it, has, has built one of the best brands in, in crowdfunding, and I think that anybody is looking to figure out, you know, how you can be successful crowdfunding, you really got to study what Miso is doing, you know, you should go to the web page, go, go try to find the email copy they're sending out like a lot of thought and work goes into it, um, because this is, this is not push button.

‍

And money, you know, like that you got to really work, work this crowd fund and nobody works harder than me, so, and they've really figured out um how to make that scalable and how to make that work, you know, so that, so if you're listening to this, you, you want to figure it out, you gotta go.

‍

Go look at me so.

‍

Rich Hull: I, I think that's fair. I mean, I'll, I'll add one more thing to that, which is like there was probably a time in equity crowdfunding where you just hung a shingle and money came, but those days are long gone, right?

‍

And so, and the novelty of it, you know, all that means is that the novelty of it is worn off and now people are making very thoughtful investment decisions about it and they're looking for a return on their capital as opposed to just thinking, oh this seems neat, I should try it. And so I think that's the evolution of the, you know, retail crowdfunding market.

‍

But if you ever needed a proof point for that, look at what's happening in the, you know, really large hedge fund space where you've got BlackRock and really big firms, household name firms that are now raising retail capital for their hedge funds, which they, which they're calling evergreen funds, um, and they're tapping into that because they too see the value in it and, you know, really the idea is simply that you're giving Main Street investors access to the deals that are going to become household names, which were generally reserved for, you know, a very small group of high net worth people who are very well connected, who could get access to private deals before they launched to the public and they were making generational wealth and so crowdfunding came in and said, well, we can do that same thing just on a smaller scale with everyday investors and so now you're seeing some of the smartest institutional fundraisers on the planet now starting to tap into it and I think it's a great proof point for the industry.

‍

And, and I appreciate what Buck said. I mean, we do spend a lot of time, you know, we kind of have this always on crowdfunding strategy where we sort of ebb and flow in terms of having um rounds that are open, but we're always kind of thinking about our next round and we're very um, thoughtful, I think is a good, a good, good phrase, you know, about how we go and tell our story and talk to our community and keep them updated and communication is very important to us. So we're always thinking about what's the right way to talk about what we're doing to our, our, our community.

‍

Jon Stidd: Well, Rich, I think that's a good point. I want to circle back to the retail investor there, um, that item, the, you know, cause as Buck mentioned, right, and then Rich, you said, you know, there's probably a time several years ago where you could, you know, throw up a, you know, throw up a website and raise some capital, right? But it's changed now where, you know, you have to have, uh, you know, investors are investing in your, in your brand when they do, right? So, you know, taking the time to polish that brand and be thoughtful about email communications, you know, this is not something to go to market with when you're still, you know, back to the napkin sketch.

‍

Um, it's important to build a brand around that. So I wanted to, to focus on that and, and highlight that point because, um, you know, that's a good tip for anybody in the crowd listening. It's like, you know, you need to, you know, take note of companies that have done it successfully because their brand looks and feels good, right? Um, it looks polished because, you know, the benefit of raising capital digitally is that you can, you know, do that from anyone, right? Somebody in Montana recognizes your brand, right? But at the same time, you need to have something that is polished and, um, you know, looks like something that, you know, somebody would want to invest in. So, um, it's a great point about BlackRock, right? Like Larry Fink, I think his last investor memo talked a lot about that retail investor, so.

‍

It's done for you. I know, you know, in your past experience, um, it's likely that you've raised capital, you've you've done it with the institutional game, you know, what made you decide that retail capital was the right route for you at RISE?

‍

Hiten Sonpal: So a couple of things. So the first couple of data points was, is this possible, right? So having seen what was happening at Miso and then what Buck was making happen at Graze Robotics, convinced me that there was an opportunity for RISE to do something similar.

‍

That was kind of the first piece of, OK, this is possible. And then the second piece was, OK, can we do it?

‍

Uh, and when I joined, uh, the gentleman that brought me on board was Arron Acosta. He's the former CEO, now the head of business development, one of the co-founders of the company.

‍

And right after he brought me on board, he said, you know, we have a huge following at RISE.

‍

And even our suppliers who show up, you know, uh, these are, uh, imagine a delivery that happens, right? Someone shows up with heavy equipment because we have a bunch of heavy equipment here. They see what we're doing, they start asking questions and once they realize that we're doing something very new, something that's going to replace hydraulics, and they've dealt with hydraulic equipment and they understand the potential.

‍

The next question is, so how do I get in on this, right? And so we've had all of these people, uh, either who know of us from the robotics community here in Massachusetts, suppliers that we work with, uh, potential customers, uh, and engineers that work at our supplier sites or our potential customer sites that see what we're doing and get excited want to find a way to invest in the company. So he shared this with me and I said, you know what, maybe there'll be a time when we'll get a chance to bring these people on board.

‍

And then as we started talking to VCs, Jon, everything that you explained happened, which is that I started to get a sense of, OK, these guys don't really understand what we're doing. They're looking for SaaS, they're looking for AI, which by the way, that bubble is gonna burst soon because uh AI companies are getting eaten up by other AI companies in weeks, right, even before they can acquire their first customer, they're out of business because someone came up with a cheaper, faster way to do something. So we built this business that has, you know, 25 patents, it's got a, it's got a nice moat, and it's something that's going to be here for a long time. So we thought, OK. Institutional VCs aren't getting it or need to see more proof points. They always want more proof points. How about we open up our last round and make that accessible to the public so the valuation is fair. It's what the institutions have paid before, and let's do a testing the waters campaign to see what it looks like. So we did a test and the test was successful. We had $800,000 worth of interest in a few weeks, um, and then that's when we said, OK, this is real.

‍

Um, there are people with whom this campaign is resonating and let's go make it happen.

‍

Jon Stidd: Yeah, spot on, and I want to touch more on some of those tactics, but yeah, it's, uh, AI is a scary world right now if you're creating some rapper, right, you know, you're, you're next on Google's feature list, and I wouldn't want to be on their path. So, you know, having seen hundreds of companies raise capital this way, I'm always, you know, partial to the, uh, the robotics companies. I love what you guys are building. It's visual and visceral, and you can see it out there, right? Um, and there's some real moats around that, um.

‍

And you know, I also think there's some competitive differentiators that you guys have built up in raising capital, and I want to talk about, you know, some of those tactics, um, that, you know, and you were just speaking about, right? And Rich and Buck we were talking about it in the, in the Miso brand there, but when you guys think about Investor acquisition and bringing on investors, whether it's storytelling, right, or channel acquisition, you know, partnerships, or even something like email and the webinars you guys run, right?

‍

Um, can you touch on any specific individual tactics that, you know, you think moved the needle and helped you tell the story of the company because I want to make sure that the crowd here hears that today. What are some of those individual tactics and let's reverse around the horn there, um, and Hiten, we'll we'll start with you on that one.

‍

Rich Hull: And before we move on to that, um, I, I just want to weigh in on one thing that you guys were just talking about to kind of punctuate, uh, both, uh, you know, AI and institutional capital, um, because I, I agree that the AI market changes before our eyes every single day. It's, you know, on the one hand, it's probably the most impactful, professional or you know, the most impactful evolution in our professional lifetimes that's gonna happen, right? It's probably a 10X force multiplier for what we do and how we do it in every area of all of our lives. But one of the challenges is that most investors, even institutional investors, are priced out of it.

‍

Like if you want to get into the next round of Waymo or OpenAI, you can write a billion dollar check and they'll probably let you in at some insane valuation.

‍

But short of that, they don't really want you in that round. Good luck getting in.

‍

And so I think this is the opportunity where you're seeing through companies like ours, and I say that collectively, uh for everybody on this call is the opportunity to tap into industry specific AI. At, you know, modest pricing when it comes to check sizes.

‍

And, um, and, and we're on the next, we're the sort of cusp of the next wave of AI. The first wave of AI was generalist, like open AI is all things to all people, whereas what you're seeing now is industry specific AI where companies like ours take those open source tools and really use it to go deep in a specific industry, in our case, restaurant kitchens.

‍

Um, and I think it's an incredible moment for investors to be able to tap into that.

‍

And then also, as you were talking about institutional capital, you know, if you look at Miso, like, if you again if you need a proof point for retail investing, Miso has 3 constituents on its cap table. We've got crowdfunding investors, and then we've got strategic investors like Ecolab who's a very sophisticated $70 billion public company, and then we've got some institutional investors as well.

‍

And so I think when you look at those together.

‍

Um, Buck's fund, uh, you know, is one of those institutional investors from the early days of Miso. And so being able to have a home for each one of those constituents is really unique.

‍

And there's value in the retail investing side. There's value in the strategic investing side, and there's value in the institutional side. And having all of those play together on our cap table, I think is one of the things that makes me so, you know, really unique. And so I don't want to hijack this call to talk about how we do it. And if you want to learn more, you can go to Misorobotics.com and click around and you'll kind of see what I'm talking about.

‍

But I think that that's a really great additional proof point here. So I'll be quiet and let you guys chime in on, uh, on the tricks of the trade for marketing. Uh, but, uh, and I'll, I'll surely jump back in after that and tell you how we do it too.

‍

Jon Stidd: I love when this is more uh risk-based cause I was gonna bring that up. A common misconception in equity crowdfunding is, you know, it's like one or the other and you know, we like to think about the capital stack, institutional funding, retail capital, that sort of thing. Buck, did you want to piggyback on that point? I'm really glad I got brought up.

‍

Buck Jordan: Yeah, I mean, I mean, and I think that like um.

‍

Uh, both are incredible things to pursue. You can't just do it overnight though, you know, you've, you've got to build a brand, you've gotta do all the, uh, do all the work that you need to get ready for a, for a raise, you know, it takes a while, um, and so, you know, I, I encourage people to, even if they're pursuing a nutritional strategy to also just kind of like, you know, run a crowdfund in parallel, and they can decide if they want to do crowdfund or not, um, but there's some really interesting kind of features of a crowdfund, I mean, versus of an institutional raise. I mean institutional raise like you can just strike out and raise no money, and then you're dead.

‍

You know, a crowdfund, you can hit big or you can hit small, you rarely hit zero. That makes sense, you know.

‍

Um, so, so I would recommend, um, you know, trying to do both because I do think there's a certain level of support that comes from crowdfunding. It doesn't always come from institutional, you know, financing because you're, because institutional financing is all personality driven and luck driven and you know being the right person on the right day versus um versus crowdfunding is a little more programmatic and, and when it comes to like programmatic um fundraising like this, um, I've raised from just about every platform out there and now I'll only raise on DealMaker and it's because Uh, well, they've been in it for longer, um, you know, Jon and his team at Reach specifically, um, has, have, have been, been in it longer, have seen the tricks of the trade, so to speak, and they got these look alike campaigns that perform really well, um, and so I'd be really wary of going with, especially if it's your first time crowdfunding. I'd be really wary of going with someone new, uh, or some marketing agents that you just met that you haven't properly vetted, that hasn't raised $100 million for Miso Robotics or someone else, you know, um, so I've, I've found that like, uh, I guess dual tracking would be how to sum it up. It's good to dual track. It's good to make sure you're working with the best experts you can find, which for me has been a DealMaker, um. And then you gotta be really thoughtful about how you tell a story and also how you tell a story that works for both institutions and for funding.

‍

Jon Stidd: Yeah, Buck, thanks for bringing that up because the, you know, yeah, dual track, right? But you know, you talk about digital on it being more programmatic, right? The inputs and outputs are correlated. You can see that, that tracking, right? Um, and we can hone in on what's working and what's not and that message and, and look at those individual channels to say, OK, you know, how can we scale up and raise more capital here? Um. Hiten, was that part of, you know, your sort of mental math and deciding to to raise capital this way and uh when you have in the past, like, what have you seen work for you guys as a brand?

‍

Hiten Sonpal: Yeah, so, um, there we got a lot of interesting points and I wanted to piggyback on some of the things that, uh, Rich and Buck have talked about, which is that, uh, now our cap table is a very hybrid cap table. We've got institutional investors like uh the engine, we've got family offices, we've got um strategics like Gates Corporation, and now we have, you know, uh, retail investors. It's through Wefunder, we have one line on the cap table, but we have a lot of retail investors and we can now continue this multi-pronged strategy forward uh on any platform including DealMaker, which is exciting.

‍

And we can continue to raise capital from family offices, from strategics, and from institutionals.

‍

So that multi-pronged strategy holds true even if one decides to do crowdfunding, which is fantastic.

‍

And then in terms of marketing efforts and brand building, which uh Buck mentioned is so important, um, when I joined, I had to find a way to do it quickly, right? How do I get a lot of people on the platform and so initially, I thought that I should probably start with a platform where I can find investors, um, and so that's, we looked at, you know, who already has an investor base that I can start with, um, and so we looked at Wefunder, we looked at Republic, we looked at Start Engine, um.

‍

And I think at the point that we were, it made sense for us to start there, to start with a base, but now that we start to build a brand and the brand is built, I think we can open up um and reach a wider base if we are to start to drive our own fundraise ourselves using the DealMaker platform. One of the things I did to get the brand building started since this is one of the questions that came up.

‍

Um, as I asked the team, is there anything that we're doing that is remarkable beyond the cortex, which is, of course, very interesting.

‍

And the team mentioned to me that RISE Robotics had built the world's strongest robotic arm, and I said, get out of here. That doesn't sound right. They said, no, no, this thing that we built for the Department of Defense, it's a material handling unit, lifts 7000 pounds.

‍

It is the world's strongest robotic arm. The next strongest one is built by Fanic. Now Fanic is a $6 billion company. They have an arm that lifts 4000 pounds. We have one that builds 7000, and I said, Well, what makes it a robotic arm? And they said, Well, it's got 60 degrees of freedom. It can manipulate things in all dimensions. I'm like, I don't believe this. And so the team convinced me. That was that we actually had built in this facility the world's strongest robotic arms. So we called the Guinness book and we said, Hey, we want to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for this.

‍

So they came, they asked us, they did an industry search.

‍

We had a third party come in. They wanted officers from Somerville to come in, observe the test, and we did a test and We got it in the Guinness Book and so we use that to sort of launch and announce. I did a press release. I did a celebration here, invited local members of the community, invited the press, and that got the thing sort of started. And I think that, uh, many companies inside, if the team has been together for a while, have done something unique and exciting for the first time.

‍

And if they just were to look around and ask the team what's going on, they'd be surprised at what they could find and how they could celebrate what they've accomplished.

‍

So that's one of the tricks that we use to sort of get out there.

‍

Jon Stidd: Wonderful. I, well, there's such a strong digital component to that, right? That you mentioned both the sort of, you know, noteworthy, uh, headline there of, you know, strongest robotic arm, right? And then capitalizing on that to, you know, bring in eyeballs and launch arrays on the back of that. That's really like, you know, how do you take what you all have built and match it to a digital investor acquisition game, um.

‍

Rich, uh, if there's anything there that you want to touch on, I've, I've always loved the, the visual nature of, of Flippy, right, or, you know, anything in particular that you love to look at in the dashboards and you think, look at things driving, you know, marketing ROI. Are there any uh uh tactics or or strategies that you want to share with the audience?

‍

Rich Hull: Well, Flippy does make for a good video, that's for sure, and I think there's an element.

‍

That drives of that, you know, quite frankly, that drives miso's past success in crowdfunding is that it's simple to understand, you know, everybody likes robots and they're intrigued by them, uh, everybody knows restaurants and the collision of those two things is pretty simple to understand when you've got uh a robot arm making french fries.

‍

And so I think that surely helps, right? So I think it's, I see crowdfunding companies go out and try to raise, and I can't even figure out what they do and obviously that's not going to be successful. So there's a marketing narrative like Hiten talked about, you know, and I love the You know, kind of proof point that the Guinness Book of World Records provides you, just in terms of a hook. And I think that's, you know, part of the battle, but I think there's another element too, which is just the transparency narrative. The way you come to investors and talk to them about your company at this stage, ultimately, I think influences your success at the later stage when you're trying to create a liquidity event for them.

‍

Like for me, you know, I came here, I took a massive pay cut. My pay package is largely built on success.

‍

And so for me, I'm in the same boat as the shareholders, um, and so we are very aligned on our agenda about creating, you know, a liquidity event, an exit for Miso.

‍

Well, one of the things that attracted me about this job is the idea of taking Miso public. And so because I think it's a simple story to understand.

‍

Uh, I, you know, there haven't been that many companies that have raised equity crowdfunding at scale that have gone public, um, and so I want to be the one of the guys that does that. I have a crazy thing in my world where I always like to be the first person to do stuff. Um, it, uh, sometimes makes, uh, for very long days, but I'm motivated by that. It gets me up every morning and I want to be one of the guys that does that. And so when we go and hopefully try to take Miso public, being able to explain to Wall Street that there're 40,000 retail investors who have already raised their hand and said, I'm interested in this company.

‍

I think it's a really great proof point. And so if you're transparent about the way you tell your story to them early on and you communicate with them, you know, after you take their money, uh, and you're consistent about it, and you're transparent about it, and you don't just forget about them. By the time you're ready to go public, which is what we're all focused on doing, you know, I think that's a real valuable asset.

‍

Similarly, like we talked about earlier, if you've got other types of investors on your cap table, they too bring different types of value. Like a strategic is an obvious acquirer of the business who may say, before you have the opportunity to go public, hey, I'm just going to snatch that up. They're motivated to support your success, so maybe you can get big enough that a large company who's a strategic company could make that strategic acquisition, you know, before you even get to the public market. So I think a lot of it just comes down to: you know, how you talk to people and in terms of cost of capital, that's a huge, huge consideration.

‍

I think that, you know, I'm very data driven. We make a lot of decisions here, you know, based on data and the cost of capital is a massive one for us. Uh, we look at it all the time and we want to make sure that we're being as efficient as we can through our you know, our paid social marketing, through our email campaigns, uh, through our webinars, like we really pay attention to the cost of all of that, um, because it, it has to be, it's, it's better for investors.

‍

To have more money go into the pocket of the company that they can use for operations as opposed to having to spend a lot of money to drive every dollar, and I think that's really important to pay attention to as well beyond just the marketing narrative and the transparency narrative and, you know, all the things that really I think lead to a successful crowdfunding campaign.

‍

Jon Stidd: Yeah, Rich, I'm glad you brought that up. I wanted to, uh, you know, that point there ties back to what Buck had mentioned before about that programmatic nature, right? We can see where the spend is going and monitor your cost of capital, right? Um, so that, you know, you make sure that you all have what you need to execute. Um, you've touched a little bit on the community there, and you guys are making my job as moderator easy. I want to talk about some of those community benefits. Um, Buck, anything to add before I move on to community? Because I also wanna talk to you about the community, you know, having done a lot of capital raises in this space, um, across different brands. Um, you know, you're certainly one to speak on that, but anything to touch on in terms of tactics or strategies before I move on?

‍

Buck Jordan: Um, no, just, just I, I think don't, don't take the crowd for granted.

‍

You know, they're, they're real investors, they are valuation sensitive, um, you know, you can't just um raise money from them and then forget about them and then come back to them later and expect them to still be there. You gotta have a constant drumbeat of communication, you know, it's like I think that um you probably need to communicate.

‍

A little bit more um than you do with institutional institutional investors institutional investors, there's only a handful of them, and they're gonna call you on the phone, um, you know, so, uh, thankfully there's not 40,000 people with the Rich’s number you never get any work done, um, but, but you have to be really thoughtful about communication.

‍

Jon Stidd: Yeah, I think that's part of it.

‍

Rich Hull: Yeah, I think there's another part of that too, which is, is in some respects, one of the great things about crowdfunding is that you are forced to talk about your business, whether you like it or not, because when you take crowdfunding capital, you then are entering what is a fairly highly regulated industry by the SEC and you're then required to file, you know, future reports a couple times a year that talk about your business and that, you know.

‍

Show your revenues, show your expenses, and, but they give you the opportunity to talk about your business in a way that, you know, and you sure you don't want to be filing, you know, bad reports with the SEC. They don't tend to like that.

‍

Um, and so I think there's an element of it that's forced and then the part that Buck's talking about is to go that extra mile and to then, you know, really provide a whole lot more color to your investors through that recurring drumbeat.

‍

And, to me, what we try to do is we try to provide that communication in different ways so that people that are looking for different communicative experiences can get what they want. We try to meet people where they are, not force them to come to us. So if you're into, you know, every financial detail of the business, you can go to the SEC's Edgar website and you can see that about Miso.

‍

Um, and then, you know, similarly, if you like long lengthy narrative shareholder updates like we send those.

‍

And if you want bite size, uh, you know, kind of small blasts on a more regular basis, we send those.

‍

And if you want social updates, we post those like we even leverage, you know, Jon, your engaged platform that DealMaker has on their platform to post updates. So like we try to provide these updates in different formats so the people that want the short bursts of information can get it, people that want the deep dive can get it. I think it's really important to kind of take advantage of all those, otherwise you're missing the opportunity to share your story with your investors.

‍

Jon Stidd: 100%. I'm glad you guys are touching on that and Buck mentioned that, you know, don't, don't take that investor for granted, right? Then that's the power of that communication and honestly, it's that communication A) it's good for transparency, but also B) you know, leads to more capital the next time that round is open.

‍

Um, so, you know, Rich, I know you guys have had success with that and that comes with the transparency of comm uh, and then Buck, you know, companies under, under Vebu have, have done that as well, right? So that communication that you do, right, is about transparency, but, you know, next time you're going to raise capital, it's helpful that you've spoken to them before and given them ongoing updates. So, you know, every time you reach out, it's not just to ask for money, basically, um, that communication strategy is really important and want everybody to know some of the things that Rich talked about there for those different mediums of how that takes place, right? It's really important, you know, you may send out an SMS message before a webinar to remind them to hop on it, right? Or, you know, do that long form email or like Rich said, you know, direct them to the engaged platform where they can, you know, access, uh, information about their investment.

‍

Rich Hull: Yeah, I think webinars are really important too, and you know, to me that's the equivalent of a public company's earnings call. They do it about once a quarter. We do webinars about once a quarter.

‍

And so, uh, anybody can jump on whether you're a potential investor, a current investor, our competitors, we jump on those calls, so we try to be thoughtful about what we reveal about things like our sales pipeline and so forth.

‍

Uh, but, but to me, that's great. The fact that they're tuning in.

‍

Uh, I think it's really important and so that's just another path that you have to make yourself available for that type of communication.

‍

Jon Stidd: Yeah, spot on. And then for you all, right, like a lot of interest in campaign number one for that raise, right, you built up a community. How do you think about talking to them in between rounds or any sort of strategic approach there?

‍

Hiten Sonpal: Yeah, so we're doing the same.

‍

Uh, we have a monthly update that, uh, frankly called the Ryzencider which has been going on for a long time, even before we started around um in January, and then, um, we're doing the social post, so you know, when we have events and we have people coming into the office whether it's an open house or, we did a little stunt here where, uh, because we knew we could, we picked up a Ford F-150 Lightning using the strongest robotic arm and we kind of spun it around and we had a lot of people here for Father's Day. Kids showed up just to see it. So it was nice to do it for the community.

‍

But things like that, we end up posting that on social media so people can see what we're able to do, what we are doing. And when we go to conferences and events, we talk about them, and then we usually do a quick social post of how many contacts we made and here's how it's turning into a pipeline. Here's the progress that we're making. And we happen to be, as I mentioned in this really exciting phase of commercialization where things are getting productized.

‍

Uh, what you see back there is a test fixture that we're setting up to start testing the liftgate platforms. So we have a lot of visual things to show our investors in terms of progress, so they can see the progress is real. And, and we, and we usually put something out 2 to 3 times a week on social media where they know exactly where the company is and the progress that we're making.

‍

Jon Stidd: Wonderful. But yeah, that was really well put. um, I think you, you had touched on something there that I think, um, I don't know, for whatever reason founders and teams and, and, and leaders kind of get hung up on, you know, what should this update be? How do we update them? And I always joke, you know, everything's grist for the mill. It's, you know, you, you're at a conference, so you talk about it, right? Um, you've got something going on, you know, on the floor back there, it's like you, you talk about it.

‍

Um, I think people overlook the, you know, the content that they create. That's just a byproduct of their business anyways and their operations and, and how that can be used for really compelling content, engaging content, right, and keeping people informed. So it doesn't have to be anything new that you create. Um, oftentimes it's just a byproduct of your business, you know, people are curious what's going on.

‍

Hiten Sonpal: Yeah, yeah, I sometimes have to remind my team, hey, we're there, can you please take a few pictures and some videos because you are already there and most recently I started to egg the testing team saying, hey, we're doing all of these tests.

‍

Let our investors see what we're doing to make a robust product. Let's get it out there.

‍

So, uh, but you're right, it's, it's, it's all happening anyway. All we have to do is just take a camera up to it, right?

‍

Jon Stidd: 100%. So, I want to save time on the back end here for everybody with some Q&A. Before we get to that, I want to offer a quick lightning round that we'll do here. You guys have dished out a lot of advice, right? How do people raise capital? How do you think about that, nurturing, you know, data-driven capital raising the capital stack. You know, is there anything else that you want to touch on, or maybe one sentence of advice for, you know, founders out there and operators who are thinking about raising money from their community or, you know, leveraging digital to build their own community? Um, let's start with Buck on that one, and then we'll go Rich and Hiten.

‍

Buck Jordan: Sure, um, well, if you're a, you have to be a robotics founder.

‍

Um, you know, you've entered the most, uh, capital intensive sport in startup, um, and my advice to you is control your burn, don't go, don't go crazy and don't, um, Don't, uh, spend money you don't have, you know, because especially when it comes to crowdfunding because crowdfunding, you know, you make, you, you raise the bulk of your capital last month, last week, last day, it's, you don't know how much money you have until, until it's all over, um, and so don't spend ahead of that. So I think that's like um.

‍

My advice to just control your costs, um, and, uh.

‍

You know, slow it down if you need to. The only reason you'll ever fail is you run out of money.

‍

Well, but

‍

Rich Hull: yeah, I agree, robotics and, you know.

‍

We've started referring to robotics as physical AI. It's kind of where AI makes the physical world and um and it is a, as Buck mentioned, it is a, uh, it is a rare um, vertical, I guess in the startup community because it operates differently than most other startups. If you're a fintech business, you know, you're gonna kind of grow 5%, 10%, 15% every year. It's gonna be a nice steady climb and you can see progress and that's what institutional investors like to see.

‍

Robotics, on the other hand, You're coming in, you're being disruptive to an entire industry, and so you're gonna kind of starve for a while because you have to drop a lot of capital into the R&D and the development of your product. And then you've got to go out and you've got to prove the product market fit, and you've got to find some customers to help you get to, you know, kind of through the testing and you're gonna have to learn from them. There's like a whole bunch of stages to it, and all robotics companies go through the same exact phases. I mean, if you think about Waymo even.

‍

You know, everybody's been talking about Waymo and their self-driving cars for 3 or 4 years.

‍

Um, they've been around for almost 20 years.

‍

Where they've really taken the time to be very thoughtful about what they are designing because obviously the stakes are very high. You've got life and death situations, but now those cars drive better than humans. The accident rate on those cars is minuscule compared to having a human behind the wheel.

‍

And so robotics is just very unique and not all institutional investors really understand that.

‍

Um, and, and, and are in it for the long haul. They're out to get sometimes a short term, uh, return. And so I agree with Buck, um, that we're a little bit unique. I also agree with Buck that you're better to start sooner than later.

‍

I think the thing that I see that creates failure for companies is when they start at the very last second thinking that.

‍

Equity crowdfunding is gonna just be this like savior that they're gonna flick a switch and the coffers are gonna fill up tomorrow and that's not how it works. Like you've got to work it, you've gotta be patient, you've got to be thoughtful, and you're gonna probably raise most of your capital at the end and so this is really a game of survival and um and the companies.

‍

That doesn't make it, don't make it because they just can't survive, right? So don't wait too long, think a lot in advance, start to learn about it. There's different types of crowdfunding. There's a Reg CF which is kind of a smaller round. There's Reg A, which is a larger round.

‍

Educate yourself about the difference between those two because they're, they're good for certain types of situations and you really need to understand which of the two that you want to do.

‍

And so I think you can't ever start learning about how to do it too soon and you can't start that process too soon.

‍

Buck Jordan: Well, I know we're lightning round with this, but Rich brings up a good point because you know, like, like, um, uh, you're touching on that you don't see a lot of progress in robotics companies and I, I think in a way, you know, because like to build a piece of hardware, especially when it comes it's in the food space, you've got to get, you've gotta design it, you gotta make it food safe.

‍

Whoops, you gotta build a whole new one. You probably gonna build 3-4 products before you can actually get into revenue and, and, and if product cycles are like 12-18 months of development, jeez, that's painful. You know, why are robotics companies failing in the institutional world? It's because seed investors invest in the dream. Series A guy sees sees progress in some LOIs, and by the time the Series B comes, there's not a bunch of revenue sitting there to validate and so boom down round or the company dies or does an extension around, see so many companies that are in the hardware space that just can't get there. They build like they get to like the 5 yard line. There's a couple of companies I could name but I guess I shouldn't be here. I think it's like the 5 yard line. And they're just dead because our investors are, are worn out and they're not waiting for that big promised land that comes when you finally have a product that you can ship, you know, Miso's got a product you can ship now and um and it's like, and, and that's why people, that's why these robotics companies are dying in the institutional space. That's why I think it's important to kind of mix in different kinds of uh fundraising.

‍

Rich Hull: But I think the payoff is really big. If you can get there, right? Obviously you have to get there, but if you can get there, then the disruption that occurs in the payoff is a hockey stick. Unlike that Fintech business that I said earlier, that is a nice slow build, you starve, starve, starve, and then boom, one year you go like that and that's the real kind of payoff. And I think that's, um, and that's what we're all looking for. That's why we're all doing it.

‍

Buck Jordan: And yeah, the lock-in is nuts. I mean, like you, you, like, especially in the food space like you jam like let's say Flippy in in the back of a kitchen, you install it and bolt it into their into their store, and it takes, it took, it took takes them forever to get that brand to be comfortable with a robot in the kitchen, which is totally alien, you know, like there's no, so there's no way that like um some competitors gonna come along and like boot you out of that spot, it's just not gonna happen, you know, and so like. Like, like, it's worth the payoff because once you get in there, like you're in for life. I'm not you know, not for life, but like you're in for a very long time, super hard to get you out and like that's that's why acquirers will buy you and that's why people will go public success.

‍

Rich Hull: It is a land and expand strategy, I think in most robotics and especially when I think about the restaurant space, it is not a technology business. I mean, you know, the front of the house was automated about 20 years ago with the advent of OpenTable, point of sale systems, and online reservations.

‍

The former president of OpenTable sits on our board. He talks about that moment a lot when the front of the house was modernizing. The back of the house has operated the same way for the last 50 years. So these are, these brands are not tech forward companies. And so as Buck mentioned, um, if you can get in there and then you're bolted into the floor.

‍

And there's a lot of inertia, like resistance to change, right? Then when it comes time for them to automate the next thing in the kitchen, they're not gonna go elsewhere, they're gonna come to you and say, hey, let's do this second product.

‍

This would be really great. And I've got this real problem. I want you to help me solve it, right? So it's the land and expand strategy that is so unique in robotics that really allows these companies, while they might get kind of a slow start, they have a lot of longevity.

‍

For the ones that are successful because of that, because what they do is complicated. It's not something that the restaurants can do on their own. They need a partner to do it and it takes a while to build that trust with them.

‍

Jon Stidd: Yeah.

‍

Rich it ties back to your point, right? That's like the wonderful nature of bringing the crowd along for the ride, right? People didn't have access to those opportunities before. So Hiten anything from, from you in the, in the lightning round here, it turned into a storm, which I love.

‍

Hiten Sonpal: Yeah, I agree with Buck that you want to conserve cash obviously. Also the fact that these products are sticky, right? So, uh, it's not like software which again, uh, as Rich said, can be booted out of there.

‍

Uh, once we get a design win, uh, on a particular machine, I mean, we have that design for 10 years, right? So it's recurring revenue for us. We acquire the customer once and then, um, as Rich mentioned, it is land and expand, so we get a design win with one machine with one OEM. That OEM is going to electrify their entire line using our tech, so very much land and expand. The one other thing I'll say is that not to just look at the retail investors as a source of money.

‍

So our investor base right now is not as big as uh, as the other two gentlemen here in the call, but we've got 100 and uh we've got 1100 investors and growing.

‍

And so many of them are reaching out to us and telling, hey, how can I help you guys? I can make other connections to other investors. I can make connections to OEMs that would be interested in your tech.

‍

I can get you into this trade show. I want you to go talk to this angel group, right? So we have this huge pull from our investor community that's really turned into our champions, our evangelists, our salesmen. I have the largest sales force of any tech company in Massachusetts. I've got 1100 salespeople. It's just, and it's growing. It's just fantastic.

‍

Jon Stidd: But on average there are many people in Montana there. Um, yeah, thank you guys for that. We've got a couple minutes here, we'll get to a couple of questions. Um, I'm gonna take a few that I felt like had bubbled up. If you guys have anything to piggyback on these, please do. I've got one that I'm gonna direct at at some of you guys here, but, uh, one of the first questions was around, um, the crowdfunding raise and your average, you know, cost per investor, they talk about marketing efficiency ratio, which is as you scale up, maybe let's just talk about return on ads then, so in aggregate, um, what these campaigns can look like and then the, the budget breakdown there, so.

‍

You know, we see some campaigns, 3x 6x. You can have extreme outcomes in there at 10x, right? Um, let's just say that, you know, we're at 5x on a $5 million round. So you've spent $500k to raise $5 million right? Um, it's pretty unevenly weighted, right? As, you know, Rich, we've ridden with you through. Some of these closes and, and Buck, you know, we're, we're planning to scale up in that final month to bring in that capital. So, you know, that can be how it breaks down.

‍

Um, the return on ad spend there is gonna be dependent on how well you can tell your story across these different channels, do these nurturing tactics like Rich had mentioned, those webinars, right? Um, So, you know, ROAS is always gonna be a function of that and how well your story resonates in those. Um, when we think about the next part of this question is that allocation breakdown, right? Where do we spend that across, you know, paid media, social, email, that sort of thing, some of those channels are a little more, uh, last click we call them, you know, email, they come in, they're familiar, right? And then you're continuing to educate them. They may, you know, come in and invest, um, you know, after they get the webinar email that goes out. When we think about channel allocation, it ties to something Buck had mentioned and Rich had touched on it too, that sort of programmatic nature.

‍

We can see which channels are, are moving the needle, and not just which channel, which ad, right? So we could say Hiten like, you know, oh, that Guinness Book hook is really working here. We're gonna use that video or, you know, you guys lifting up the Ford F-150 Lightning. And so some of that budget allocation is something that we determine as we continue to scale up the campaigns, and that's why it's more heavily weighted at the back end, right?

‍

You're gonna spend more on that final month behind the urgency of, you know, final month to invest, final day to invest, and then also, you know, what images, videos, headlines work best to tell your story and bring investors through the funnel. So, um, there's a lot that goes into that, and again, it, you know, like Buck had mentioned, that programmatic exercise of, you know, how do you spend that capital and like Rich had mentioned, how do you do that in a way that's, you know, make sure you're keeping to your efficiency standards.

‍

Long answer there.

‍

Um,

‍

Rich Hull: Well, I'll tell you how we do it at Miso, uh, you know, obviously there's different costs that go into it. Advertising is only one part of it. So when you think about ad spin, that's in addition to things like legal and PR and other types of marketing and stuff that goes into that.

‍

So, um, for us, you know, we try to get a 3x uh return on ad spend on everything we do.

‍

If you think about it, that's roughly a 30% cost of capital, right? And then we try to bring that down.

‍

Uh, into, uh, more of the 15% range by supplementing it with things like email marketing, uh, which really didn't cost you that much, PR, which doesn't really cost you that much, webinars and bring that down, right? And so that to me is a really thoughtful way to do it. And as you mentioned, Jon, like, you have to be data-driven in how you do that.

‍

We have brought down the cost of our crowdfunding capital considerably since I've been here. I think some of that is just because of my background at ViX, we, you know, built a team, um, of, of many, many people, and all they do all day long is paid user acquisition on social media. And so, I think I came into this with probably more experience and expertise around, uh, you know, driving return on ad spend than probably most people have, but I think it's caused us to really be very considerate of our spend and very considerate of using data to tell us where to drive that spend.

‍

And so as you point out, Jon, like, we every day we look at different ad-sets that are out there running across Instagram and Facebook and all kinds of other different platforms, and we turn off the ones that are not working.

‍

And it's not a set it and forget it business. It's you, you're looking at it every single day, it's very time consuming and we've gotten, I think, very, uh, uh, you know, consistent about how we do that.

‍

So that we're not wasting money and and sometimes it's things that you don't quite understand, you know, it's, you know, to steal Hiten’s line of uh his his his concept of lifting that Ford F-150 truck, like if it's a blue truck, it may outperform a red truck, um, and you never really know, uh until you just go out and start testing those ads.

‍

So for us it's about getting the story out with the right consistency, so that you're, you're telling a consistent story across platforms and then doing it in a way that is, you know, doesn't break the bank because it's very easy to let the cost get out of control if you're not paying attention.

‍

Jon Stidd: 100%. And that's that data-driven aspect. It's about community building, how you nurture them, you know, we usually get to a couple more questions, but you guys really kept it going in those sessions, offering a lot of insight and detail there. That's gonna help everybody on here, you know, think about how they can raise capital this way. So, um, I wanna wrap up here. Say, you know, thanks to everybody who attended. If we didn't get to your question, we will, we answer these in follow-up meetings. We're also gonna send out a recording and a big thanks to you three guys, thank you so much for joining, shared a lot of insight on there, and also kindly made my work as a moderator easier by keeping the conversation going. So I really appreciate that.

‍

For the, the panels here, if you guys wanna just hang on while we end the live, you can dip after that, but we just got to upload the recording here, the audio so that people can hear this afterwards. There's a lot of people who joined, but we're gonna get um more as we send out the recording to everybody. So big thanks to everybody who joined and as well as our panelists here. Thank you guys.