对于 Danu Robotics 的创始人 Amy Ma 来说，灵光乍现的时刻是在她于伦敦一家银行担任软件开发人员多年之后。那是一家典型的金融界高端办公室——尽管福利优厚，但 Ma 在发现大楼的回收箱里的内容物最终都被倒进普通垃圾桶时，感到十分震惊。
For Danu Robotics founder Amy Ma, the eureka moment came after years of working as a software developer at a London bank. It was the kind of high-touch office that’s typical in finance — but despite all the perks, Ma was alarmed to realize that the building’s recycling bins were being emptied into the trash.
“尽管他们有钱得花不完，但那些不同的回收箱最后却都被倒进了同一个地方，”Ma 告诉 TechCrunch。
“Even though they have tons of money, there’s all these different recycling bins that just end up in the same place,” Ma told TechCrunch.
随着她对这个问题深入了解，发现情况远比想象中复杂。问题并不仅限于她所在的大楼。从整体上看，回收行业的经济模式通常依赖于人工对垃圾流进行分类，以提取不同类型的可回收材料。
The more she dug into the problem, the deeper it seemed to go. It wasn’t just her building. The economics of recycling as a whole often boil down to human beings sorting by hand through streams of waste to pull out different kinds of recyclable material.
“当时我看到这项技术，就心想：我们完全可以把做得更好，”Ma 回忆道。
“I saw the technology and thought, we can do so much better,” Ma remembers.
如今，她正通过这家位于苏格兰爱丁堡、成立六年的 Danu Robotics 兑现这一承诺。该公司制造了一款能够以更低的成本和更快的速度完成回收分类的机器人。Ma 花了六年时间打磨这一构想，如今终于将她的产品推向市场。她的机器人被命名为 H.E.R.O.，相比竞争对手具有多项优势。例如，它使用钳爪抓取物品，而非吸力系统。但更大的不同在于其商业策略：Danu 利用人工智能持续优化机器人的软件。
Now, she’s making good on that promise with six-year-old, Edinburgh, Scotland-based Danu Robotics, which makes a robot designed to sort through recycling more cheaply and quickly. Ma has been working on that idea for six years and is finally bringing her version of the product to market. Her robot, dubbed H.E.R.O., has a few advantages over its competitors. For example, it picks up items with a pincer claw instead of a suction system. But the bigger difference is the business approach: Danu leverages AI to continuously improve the robot’s software.
这一策略已经初见成效。Danu 收到了两家大型客户的意向书，并签署了价值 50 万美元的合同。更值得注意的是，超过 200 家客户已列入其销售漏斗，这使公司得以切入欧洲和北美价值 200 亿美元的回收分类市场。
The approach is already seeing some traction. Danu has letters of interest from two large customers and $500,000 worth of signed contracts. More notably, more than 200 customers are in its sales pipeline, which gives the company a hook into the $20 billion market for recycling sorting across Europe and North America.
凭借这一前景，Danu 在晚期种子轮融资中筹集了 500 万美元，以持续推动商业化进程。
On the back of that promise, Dabnu has raised $5 million in late-seed funding to keep the commercial pressure on.
目前，用于垃圾收集的机器人市场已经相当成熟，尤其是像Glacier和RecycleEye这类竞争对手提供的吸盘式机械臂。但Ma认为，回收行业的经济模式将让新进入者更容易证明自身价值。由于回收中心可以通过分拣出的材料盈利，因此一个能正常运行的系统能够立即带来投资回报。Ma估计，部署该机器人到分拣线上，一个运营站点每年可额外创造48.5万美元的收入，而初始投资仅为16万美元，每年的维护费用为2.4万美元。这一成本远低于竞争对手，而且Ma相信这款机器人的效率也会更高。
There’s already a robust market for robotic waste-pickers, particularly the suction-based arms offered by competitors like Glacier and RecycleEye. But Ma believes the economics of recycling will make it easy for a new competitor to prove its worth. Because recycling centers make money off the materials they’re able to sort out, there’s an immediate return on investment for a working system. Ma estimates that a working site will earn $485,000 in additional revenue from having the robot on the sorting line, compared with a $160,000 initial investment and $24,000 in maintenance fees each year. That’s significantly cheaper than the competition, and Ma believes the robot will be more efficient, too.
由于这些机器已经投入市场，Ma的下一个目标是让机器人更加坚固、小巧且用途更广泛。一旦其便携性足够高，就可以用于专门的垃圾处理设施之外的场景，从而开启全新的应用领域。
Since those machines are already shipping, Ma’s next goal is to make the robot sturdier, smaller, and more versatile. Once it’s portable enough, it can be used outside dedicated waste facilities, opening up a whole other world of use cases.
“一旦机器人变得更小，它就能成为独立的回收解决方案，适用于活动、购物中心、医院或机场，实现源头回收，”Ma在接受TechCrunch采访时说，“而这正是我们真正改变包装垃圾管理方式的关键。”Danu Robotics将参加于10月13日至15日在旧金山Moscone中心举行的TechCrunch Disrupt大会的“200强初创企业战场”活动。
“Once it’s smaller, it can be used as a stand-alone recycling solution for events, for shopping centers, hospitals, or airports to recycle their waste at the source,” Ma told TechCrunch, “and that’s the way we can really change how we’re managing our packaging waste.”Danu Robotics will be participating in Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, October 13-15 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.