When we first met Jean and Patricia, @BubbleRobotics did not exist.
Jean was in Milan, Patty was in Zurich. They did not know each other yet, but they were both looking for the same thing: a cofounder to build a deeply technical, ambitious company with.
In October 2024, they joined EF. They met at our kick-off weekend and teamed up immediately.
A few weeks later, after exploring multiple ideas in agriculture and recycling, they landed on the ocean.
That became Bubble Robotics: autonomous robotic systems that can stay at sea, inspect offshore infrastructure, monitor critical assets, and collect underwater data continuously.
From ideation at EF, to San Francisco, to building their first robot in a pool, to raising a $5M pre-seed round, it has been incredible to watch the pace of this team.
Proud to have backed Jean and Patty from the very beginning.
@PeterDiamandis SpaceX had achieved nothing of note after 3 years and was written off as dead after 6 years with 3 consecutive launch failures.
But you may have noticed that things are different now.
There's a different kind of robotics being built right now, and it's not on land.
While everyone debates humanoid timelines, an entire category is getting massively funded underwater.
Just look at the last 12 months:
1/ @saronic raised $1.75B Series D at $9.25B valuation from Kleiner Perkins, with $200M in revenue in 2025.
2/ @anduril's Ghost Shark went from prototype to US Navy Program of Record in 3 years. They've also won a $1.7B contract with the Royal Australian Navy on top of that.
3/ @vatnsystems raised $60M Series A from BVVC. Now the largest AUV manufacturer in the US, based in Rhode Island.
4/ @saildrone raised a $50M strategic investment from Lockheed Martin. Just launched Spectre, an anti-submarine USV with VLS strike capability.
5/ @UlyssesInc raised $46M Series A from a16z American Dynamism. Building "The Ocean Company" out of SF.
6/ @bedrockocean raised $25M Series A-2 from Primary & Northzone. Replacing fuel-hungry survey ships with AUV fleets for seafloor mapping.
7/ @bubblerobotics raised $5M pre-seed from Episode 1 & Asterion. Paris-based. Europe's first serious entry into underwater autonomy.
The ocean is 71% of the planet. There's still a lot to explore & build.
I mean, I know this is just some astroturfing thing and I should just ignore it. But seriously, don't fall for it anon, you're gonna get rugged.
The day Alibaba or Minimax or whoever open-sources their video action model, Pi will fade into obscurity and everyone will collectively remember that startups are supposed to try and make money. I would be shocked if Alibaba doesn't already have a Tesla / xAI-level real-time video model release planned for the next 12 months.
I have multiple friends at Pi, they're super smart and hard-working. And they've done great with their secondaries. I still cannot fathom how someone can look at this situation and not see the glaring sectoral risk. You're taking business and machine learning advice from the geniuses behind Everyday Robots.
Advice for anyone trying to invest in robotics: just buy Unitree on Hiive, it's still a huge discount and it's an objectively great business. Write-up on Unitree's IPO filing: https://t.co/3GsIeScY1L
Key details:
- 60% (!) gross margins
- 300% YoY growth, $250m in revenue
- Humanoids at > 50% of core revenue
The best robotics wedge nobodyâs talking about:
Industry-specific form factor â teleop deployment â proprietary workflow data â agentic automation layer on top built into the systems of the end customer â full autonomy explodes margin over time
Lower COGs than general-purpose humanoids.
Real revenue on day one.
Switching costs before youâve touched autonomy.
Distribution, cost structure, process power, counter-positioning and cornered resources are moats.
Robots arenât exempt from this.
this is actually insane
> be tech guy in australia
> adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live
> not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4
> pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA
> feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold
> zero background in biology
> identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets
> design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch
> genomics professor is âgobsmackedâ that some puppy lover did this on his own
> need ethics approval to administer it
> red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine
> 3 months, finally approved
> drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection
> tumor halves
> coat gets glossy again
> dog is alive and happy
> professor: âif we can do this for a dog, why arenât we rolling this out to humans?â
one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline.
we are going to cure so many diseases.
I dont think people realize how good things are going to get
Rui Xu, the former COO of the failed YC-backed humanoid startup K-Scale Labs shared candid insights about what went wrong on his blog, in a post titled, âSix Things I Learned Watching a Robotics Startup Die from the Inside.â
âI spent a year as COO of a YC-backed robotics startup trying to build affordable humanoid robots. I was forty, had 15 years of hardware experience shipping products at Intel, Xiaomi, Lenovo, Amazon and ByteDance, and joined to run supply chain and product operations.
The company didnât make it. We never closed our Series A. By late 2025, it was over.
Iâve written about the good parts before. The hackathons, the garage energy, the first time the robot walked. This time I want to write down what I actually learned. Some of these are industry-wide traps. Some we walked into ourselves.â
https://t.co/nylXQC5YY3
I can control your balance
I made a device that sends DC current through my head to stimulate my vestibular nerve (called galvanic vestibular stimulation or GVS) and, in doing so, can make me feel completely destabilised. By changing the direction of the current, it can make me fall in that direction.
Hook that up to keyboard controls or a joystick, and suddenly you could have your own remote control human.
Naturally, my first thought was man I wanna play trackmania with this. What else should I do?
I do not have enough self-preservation, clearly lol
#gvs #technology #science #trackmania
@Humblewank@AULaw24@txghost91@Osint613 Agreed, but post 3rd launch when they were on the brink of bankruptcy, that initial contract was a strong stimulus, they wouldnât exist without public money, they didnât have yet the capability and robustness required. You donât see that happening often w big corporate customers.