Founder Spotlight: Kacper Nowicki, NoMagic

 

What led you to found your company?

Kacper: My first startup experience was as a co-founder of a startup in Silicon Valley in 1999 during the crazy dot.com boom. While someone else was the leader of that company, being a co-founder of that startup opened my eyes about the journey from zero to one. 

How do you go from the idea, build a group of people, bring on investors, and grow into a bigger company to build a product and create a completely new value? I was fascinated by this, even though after four years that startup was not successful due to the dot.com bust. I promised myself to do it again and try to avoid mistakes we made as founders during the first go around. 

Afterwards I spent many years at Google. After a great run, I left Google thinking to myself “I’m getting older, so it’s time to do the startup I promised myself.” That was my trigger for being ready for a startup. 

There was also a practical thing that started my journey towards AI picking robots. I had read a blog post about research around hand-eye coordination. There was a demonstration of robots picking everyday items, kind of semi randomly. They did this based on visual information from the cameras training the neural network that would tell robots where to pick. And after months of training this system was incredibly successful, picking 30 unseen earlier items in 31 attempts. 

Seeing that development triggered me to think there’s something fundamental that’s going to happen in AI for the physical world, and I want to participate. That’s why I started Nomagic.

 

What big problem are you solving?

Kacper: Our society is completely dependent on a lot of manual labor. One obvious example is that we live in cities, and that’s fine, but we don’t grow food in cities, right? We go to a store to get food, or maybe we do online grocery shopping and food somehow shows up in the cities. That takes logistics. It’s a very complex network with many players, where a lot of pallets need to be loaded and then unloaded, and cases and individual items need to be handled along the way. 

There’s a lot of hard labor around this. We think that some of this work, or maybe most of this work over time, should be automated so that it’s faster, cheaper, predictable. That said, we’re not exactly in the food distribution business right now. What we do today at Nomagic is to offer solutions for e-commerce fulfillment. But there is a general, bigger problem that we are trying to solve. 

 

What new opportunities or challenges are you facing right now?

Kacper: I think it’s both an opportunity and being a change agent, which is tied to the pace of change in AI systems. We’re all following or experiencing this in many areas, but it also touches the space we are operating in. Our robots use machine learning systems to make their decisions. We’re excited about what’s next, but it also may bring some disruption to our current business. 

We are very active in building our own AI systems within Nomagic. My co-founder, Marek Cygan, is also a professor at the University of Warsaw, leading its robot learning lab, and we’re sponsoring this lab. This lab is doing fundamental research in the space, and we’re a little bit on the boundary, as a company, trying to bring in and productionize things that are very promising in the academic and fundamental research setup. It’s an exciting time that requires a lot of nimble decision making and always being ready for change.

I think it’s a very interesting space, where a lot of hardware that we use for our systems is off the shelf, but not all of it. We have some innovation in some parts, but really the AI and software can make such a fundamental difference in the capabilities of these machines.

 

In your view, what is the most important step for building an enduring company?

Kacper: Yeah, I think one is it’s hard because building a new company is hard. You need to pick a domain and a problem that, in the end, is large enough. It’s not obvious, yet it’s solvable and the opportunity is ripe. The second thing is the team. We always repeat this to new employees. 

Today we have AI and software and deployed customers and so on. So there is some legacy, but when I look forward, there’s much more to be done. And it’s going to be done by this team. 

Thus it’s about finding the right people for this journey and building the culture so that we can cooperate effectively, impactfully and fast enough. That is super important, and that has been the focus of the three founders of Nomagic from the early days. We have been explicit about the culture, to name it, to build it, to iterate on it and I think it stays very strong at Nomagic.

 

How are you thinking about global expansion?

Kacper: We’ve just raised Series B. Until now, even though we are headquartered in Warsaw in Poland, we’ve been very focused on Europe as a space where we deliver our robots. With Series B, we’re now expanding to the US, so we’re in the process of recruiting the commercial leader to help us with this expansion.

We don’t know where yet, probably East Coast, because we are working in the warehouse automation space. Silicon Valley is not really the heart of warehouse automation. 

 

How did you come to meet Hoxton Ventures?

Kacper: I spent a number of years at Google as engineering director, leading the engineering office here in Poland, and Rob from Hoxton turns out to be an ex-Googler. There is a myriad of connections between other ex-Googlers in Hoxton, and we met through one of these connections. We found a good vibe, a good level of communication. In Hoxton, we found investors who were ready to do something in physical space when it wasn’t fashionable yet. Pre humanoid robots.

 

What has been your most memorable moment, or point in time from your partnership with Hoxton Ventures?

Kacper: We’ve always liked Rob’s advice in our board meetings and other setups. But there was one particular piece of advice where he came, I would say, forcefully, and told us, you need to do this next board meeting at your other investor in Silicon Valley. It turned out to be incredibly insightful and a valuable contribution. There are many other examples, in particular around our announcements. The Hoxton family and connections to the world were very helpful to create momentum and help announce fundraising. 

 

Any advice for founders raising capital right now?

Kacper: Yes. One bit of advice or maybe two, is that you raise capital through rejection, so just embrace it, accept it and live by it. Let it give you more energy, because it’s not the first or second investor that will always invest in you, and you somehow need to find a match – that’s one. And the second one is to watch out for your energy and your health and your balance in terms of your mental and physical states. Take care of yourself.