Build With Robots is a staple of Albuquerque's technology scene.
Its headquarters at 429 Commercial St. NE is tucked squarely in the city's growing Innovation District, and since pulling in a chunk of investment early last year, the robotic disinfection company has been working to test and iterate new and existing products.
Now, after rolling out one of those new products, Chris Ziomek, Build With Robots' CEO, said the 16-person company has its eyes on growing its customer base across the U.S. It's recently found a few distribution partners to help in that work and wants to bring on over a dozen more by the end of the year.
Ziomek invited Albuquerque Business First to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the company assembles and tests its products at its 85,000-square-foot Albuquerque HQ. Below are some facts and figures from that interview with the company's CEO, along with more details about the new product and how the company runs its operations.
1,000 units
Aside from its regular product testing, Build With Robots is also in the process of expanding its network of national distributors. Ziomek said the company is currently working with three distributors and one reseller, but he wants to see that number increase to around 20 by the end of the year.
Through that growing network, Ziomek said he hopes to have 1,000 units of Build With Robots' Breezy Blue product installed and in use by the end of the year.
"At that scale, we've kind of proven out the model," he said.
The company unveiled its Breezy Blue product in February this year. It's a smaller version of the company's original product, called Breezy One.
While Breezy One has a disinfectant tank size of eight gallons, Breezy Blue's is only one-eighth that size. The two use similar technology otherwise, like their fogging mechanics and the same cloud platform to collect data.
The smaller size allows the new bots to be deployed in more flexible spaces, including ambulances.
"These are made for really large-scale production," Ziomek said about Breezy Blue when the new product was unveiled. "So thousands or tens of thousands of units."
The primary sectors for Build With Robots' products are fire and emergency medical services and what Ziomek called "jan-san," or janitorial sanitation. That latter group includes schools and warehouse spaces, for example.
Some of Build With Robots' recent distribution partnerships include those with Pro-Link, a national cleaning supplies company headquartered in Massachusetts, and LD Supply Co., an Albuquerque-based janitorial wholesale distribution firm. Goodyear Fire Department, which operates in the city of Goodyear, Arizona, has also recently started using some of the Breezy Blue disinfectant bots at one of its stations, and Albuquerque Ambulance Service, a nonprofit ambulance service affiliate with Albuquerque's Presbyterian Healthcare Services, was an early user of a Breezy Blue prototype.
Panakeia, a Florida-based advanced medical products distribution company, partnered with Build With Robots to lead the rollout with Goodyear Fire Department and help land other first responder users in the Southwest.
"Bringing Breezy Blue to an Arizona fire department has been very exciting for us," Ziomek said in a statement in late May, when the company announced the Goodyear Fire Department partnership. "This year is about expansion into new regions for Build With Robots, and we're off to a great start with partners like Panakeia who are looking to provide innovations to further support their medical community."
70 minutes
That's about how long it takes Build With Robots to assemble its Breezy Blue product at its Albuquerque headquarters. The company receives kits with the robots' parts from a supplier and then puts the bots together in-house before sending them to distributors to ship out to customers.
Ziomek said Build With Robots has the capacity to put together about five robots per day at its own headquarters, but the company also has a partnership with Albuquerque-based electronics manufacturer Delta Group Electronics for manufacturing support. Breezy Blue has gone through different design iterations to improve its manufacturability, Ziomek added.
Assembly is a five-step process, he said, which includes putting together separate hardware pieces, software testing and additional testing once the robot is set up to meet Federal Communications Commission requirements and other safety standards. That testing process is "fully automated," Ziomek said.
Log-5
Build With Robots tests its products' effectiveness daily, Ziomek said. That non-pathogenic testing includes measuring the percentage of bacteria the company's disinfectant can kill over a certain period through closed-room tests.
It measures that percentage on a logarithmic, or "log," scale. That type of scale is typically used when measuring large quantities of things — in this case, the percentage of bacteria killed by Build With Robots' disinfectant.
For example, a log reduction of one means that 90% of bacteria in a given setting were killed. That scales to 99% for log-two and 99.9% for log-three.
More sensitive environments, like hospitals, often require a log-five reduction — which is 99.999% of bacteria killed, Ziomek said..
Part of Build With Robots' testing includes figuring out what is the most effective way to reach different log levels for its disinfectant products. It may take one pre-programmed algorithm thirty seconds to hit log-three reduction, but a different algorithm two minutes to reach log-four or log-five.
Learning which disinfectant algorithms are most effective at eliminating those different logarithmic percentages of bacteria is part of the company's product performance testing.
Besides closed-room disinfectant testing, Build With Robots also conducts more minute bacterial tests of its disinfectant. Its current disinfectant product is called Breezy Biocare, which is a ready-to-use Environmental Protection Agency-approved disinfectant designed and tested in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories.
But Ziomek said the company is "actively testing" new disinfectants with different chemical compositions, ones that would be safe for places where food is prepared, for example. It already has manufacturing lined up for one of those new disinfectant products, which he said is currently being finalized through trials with a local restaurant company.
