Aseon Labs builds robotic pit stop with 10 people, $10 million

Aseon Labs is attempting a hardware project — a robotic pit stop for autonomous vehicles — that the author frames as something that would recently have required years and a large team. Instead, the company is doing it with 10 people and $10 million in funding, a scale the author presents as evidence of a new kind of startup.

The company had just spent a weekend pulling all-nighters to weld the pod together and troubleshoot its function. Engineers marked dents left by the robotic arms with Sharpies, and one engineer programmed the robot using a ChatGPT prompt rather than a traditional programming language. CEO George Kalligeros said the team does not like to admit how much AI it uses, but he later cited a six-figure-a-month token spend.