The Robot That Shows Up and Does the Work

What if the reason construction robotics never scaled wasn't the technology, but the approach?

In this special September edition of KP Unpacked, guest host Tyler Sellhorn sits down with Nadav Shuruk, co-founder and COO of Okibo, ahead of their appearance at AEC Summit on October 19th in Brooklyn. Nadav breaks down why every other construction robot has failed to reach real scale, and why Okibo's EG7 took a fundamentally different path. No BIM. No site prep. No markers. No pre-programming. You unload it from the truck, press start, and it finishes roughly 1,000 square feet of drywall or paint in an hour.

The conversation covers how Okibo was born from a family robotics business in Israel, why none of the founding team had construction experience (and why that actually helped), and how the robot's multi-task platform keeps utilization high every single day of a project. Mudding on Monday, sanding Tuesday, priming Wednesday, painting Thursday. The robot always has something to do, and that's exactly how you build trust in a conservative, low-margin industry that has been promised hardware solutions for decades and never got them.

Key questions answered:

• Why have construction robots failed to scale and what did Okibo do differently?
• How does the EG7 navigate a job site without BIM, GPS, or expensive sensors?
• What's the right split between what the robot does and what the operator does?
• How did a family robotics business in Israel end up building drywall robots?
• Why does multi-task utilization matter more than raw performance in construction?
• How long does it take to train an existing painting or taping crew to operate Okibo?
• What data does Okibo collect daily and how does it help subcontractors bid better?
• Why does the GC's buy-in determine whether a robot succeeds or fails on site?
• How does robotics connect the value chain from owner to GC to subcontractor?
• Why does one plus one equal more than two when operators and robots work together?
• What does project success as a team sport mean for robotics on a job site?
• Where can you see Okibo in person at AEC Summit in Brooklyn?

If you're a subcontractor wondering whether robotics actually works in the field, a GC trying to understand what buy-in really means for new technology, or an owner curious about what data access from a robot looks like on your project, this episode will show you why the hardware the trades were promised is finally here.

Listen now.

Catch Nadav live at AEC Summit on October 19th at the Wayland in Brooklyn.

Transcript

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Welcome And AEC Summit Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello everyone! Today our guest is Nad Truk, co-founder and COO of Okibo. Since 2018, he's been building the hardware the trades have been promised for years and never got to. A robot that actually shows up and does finished work. Okibo's EG7 finishes drywall and paints on its own, roughly 1,000 square feet in an hour, with no site prep, no BIM, no markers. The company runs out of Tel Aviv and Englewood, New Jersey. Nadav, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Hi, Tyler. Thank you for having me here.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for your time here on the podcast and your upcoming appearance at the AEC Summit on October 19th at the Whalen in Brooklyn. Regular listeners might be wondering where are KP and Nick are? Well, I'm here for the month of September, interviewing each of our AEC Summit speakers about the work behind their sessions. Brief conversations, skip the fluff, watch them here, and then grab your seat at AECSummit.co before the room fills up. Of course, if you're missing KP and Nick, they will be there in Brooklyn

Why Construction Robots Usually Fail

SPEAKER_00 1:22

too. Now, Nadav, we're curious. Robotics have been making big promises to the trades. How is it that Okibo's hardware is making good on those promises?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Well, it's a really complex uh task to bring robotics to a trade or to an industry that is very conservative, very complex in terms of uh the workflows, very uh low on margins. And the idea is to bring a robot that combines or integrates well to the workflows that the workers can trust and provide quick ROI without any complex or uh complicated presets, arrangements, pre-programming, uh, etc. So uh the way we did it is by taking a really different approach than other robotic companies in uh in this field. So, you know, people are trying to build robotics for painting and for other trades for many years, and we haven't seen you know real scale or real solution coming to the to the market. So and the way or the the approach that we took is that we felt like it it's really important to have a robot that is super easy to operate, relies on a huge technological stack instead of uh human intervention and human operation. And it's really easy to be trained and to run it on on jobs without high or long preparations, pre-programming, beam, scans, and all the other approaches out there. So this is what we've built. We've built robots that understand the environment in real time without relying on uh you know BIM or other you know external information or external data. You you unload it from a truck, bring it inside the room, load the right application, fill material in the in the hopper, press start, and that's it.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Okay.

Turning Jobsite Chaos Into Autonomy

SPEAKER_00 3:31

I am I want to pull apart a few different things there, right? You started by describing this as a complex task, and then you talked about ease of use. Connect the dots for us between taking something that is a task that is described as complex and then also like becomes something that's easy to use and easy to train.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah, that's a good good point. So job sites are really complicated environments, they're keeps on changing. You you know, you arrive on site one day and the next day it's it's completely different. Plus, you know, the walls or the ceilings are full with elements that uh can interfere with uh you know with the daily work. And it's very easy for a person to move the arm and to identify areas that you need to cover or not to cover. But for robots, it's it's a pretty complex task. So we have to you know break it down to multiple tasks or multiple uh technology stack that requires you know solutions. The first thing is you know where the robot is, try to identify the robot in this environment without GPS, without you know, um complex sensors or very expensive, expensive uh sensors. So the first thing is you know identify the walls in front of you to position the robot in front of those walls and ceilings and you know create some kind of 3D model or 3D map of the environment. The second part is once you got this information, now you need to plan the movement of a robot in multiple degrees of freedom. So you have wheels that moving, you have vertical axis that lift and a robotic arm, you have robotic arm with six degrees of six degrees of freedom and has to move around and you know uh do some kind of manipulation. This is the kind of complexity that you need uh that you need to deal with. So we've built those stacks, you know, step by step, a lot of iteration with the market. We had really good partners since uh since day one, allowing us to put the the early product prototypes in the market, and we felt that we are you know moving in the right direction and very early we took the approach that we we thought is the right one. And I think what we've done over the past years you know allows us to gather a lot of data, a lot of information, a lot of experience in how to you know bring the right kind of solution to the market. So eventually we we've came up with with a product that relies a lot on the technology rather than the than the operator. It does require an operator. So I know this the summit is a lot about teamwork, so it relies on the existing teams. You're not hiring robotics engineers or new skill set into this market. It relies on existing finishing teams, painting crews, the same uh journeymen, the same project managers are are still here to run this uh this operation. And uh with very quick training, mostly between one and two days on the job side with the support of our team, we introduce the hardware, we introduce the software and the user interface, we help to understand exactly how the robot works, and by pressing some buttons, it happens. So the robots, you know, just as I mentioned, identify the walls in front of it, adjust to the right, uh to the right position, move the arm up and down, and and perform the the job that it requires. A person moves the robot from one room to the other, fill the material, troubleshoot if needed, deal with with clogs and thinking on a daily basis. At the end of the day, clean the robot, put it to charge at the beginning of the day, you know, taking it out from the charging station, et cetera. But so it's a routine work that involves the operator and the robot. But I think one of the things that we learned over the past years is that it's very difficult, maybe it's even unrealistic to expect a robot to do 100% of the work. And we see a lot of cases that are really complex for the robot. So I think it doesn't make any sense even to try and solve all the challenges and all the geometries and all the complexity on the job side. So let the operator, which is you know the painter or the taper, deal with a very delicate, very skilled task that requires the person to do very, you know, the edges, the the small niches, and so on, and let the robot handle the heavy lifting. So if you balance between the work of the painter and the taper, or the taper and the robot, that's how you create the synergy and one plus one equals much more than two.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

So what I'm hearing you say, connecting the dots between like the complexity is is the job site. The complexity is the physical environment, right? And what I'm hearing you say is that you've made some very considered intentional decisions between which jobs belong to the robot and which jobs belong to the operator, right? And there's there's this, you know, you just describe it as synergy, this collaboration between the people on the site and the robotics itself to say, okay, uh these are the parts that belong to it versus these are the things that belong to the person. And that way we can end up in a spot where it's it's really, really well operated. You know, like you say, adds up to greater than the sum of the individual actors in in the space. I

The Okibo Origin Story

SPEAKER_00 9:40

guess maybe I'm curious to transition to learn, like, okay, so we we've we've come to the point where uh you've got operators, you've got robots in the field, right, that are that are doing the jobs now. I'm curious to learn like the origin story. How did how did you guys come to to even like be in a a place to start building that? How how did you become, you know, it's it's Okibo, it's 2026, but you know, there that was eight years before you guys got started. But how did we even get to the point where that was a thing that we were gonna try to do?

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Yeah, we have a nice story. Actually, so uh me and my partner, Guy German, we're family related. So uh we're brothers-in-law, I'm married to his sister, I know her since I was uh 12, and I'm close to him obviously a lot of years. And we've teamed up on a family business. Uh, it's a robotic company in Israel doing uh a lot of projects to the home in the homeland security sector. And so we gained a lot of uh experience with you know mobile robots, with manipulations, with uh industrial arms and uh etc. And at some point we were approached by a construction company, a company that builds concrete swimming pools in an off-site environment in factory, and they were looking to automate their process. And their vision was to 3D print these concrete swimming pools and work on the interior with robotics doing all the plastering, tiling, leveling, all the interior of a swimming pool. So this this looked like a really interesting challenge, and please remember it was about 10 years ago. I think the world the word construction tech or context was not even a word, it was not even uh invented. So we started to look at some of the solutions that were available of you know on 3D printing, and we realized that to apply wet materials at indoor environment, imagine a swimming pool as an indoor as an indoor environment. There was nothing there. And even though swimming pools were kind of a niche in that in that phase, walls and ceilings was an enormous market. And it was it it did make sense for us to start and develop this solution and start to learn and to uh to work on that. So of course we we didn't do the the project, but the company was seeking for were seeking for this project or our pre-seed money. And this was in 2018. And since then we started to develop prototypes and uh solution of how to apply wet materials in indoor environment on walls, on ceilings, with a robot that requires as less as you know intervention as possible. And this was the origination story of uh of Okibo.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Very cool.

Rapid Prototyping Without Construction Background

SPEAKER_00 12:38

I guess maybe I'm wondering okay, it's so interesting to hear you describe the theme of family businesses in the AEC industry is is so common and even inside of the robotics space. Okay, so I couldn't help but notice in your background is like a whole bunch of tools. I guess maybe I'm curious when you when when roboticists are building robots, what what are what are the tools that you have around you? Like like you're you're you're building robots to then like go and build things, right? Okay, well take us to the to the smallest unit of like you know, you guys are on your workbench building robots. Tell tell me about that process.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

So to be honest, I'm the for years in my team, I was this the only non-engineer person. So but even though I mean I do have this this uh passion on you know holding tools and you know working and uh all the team since we were very small team at the beginning, uh you know, all of us did uh did basically everything since you know building the first prototypes up to you know taking the the first robots to to labs to for certification. So from very early stage, we've you know we we we you know took some very you know uh you know we we purchased uh platform from from the market and we hacked them and we have opened them and so we use a lot of you know screwdrives and drills and cutters and everything that you know that you see here in um in the back and you know a lot of hands-on operation, a lot of uh you know improvising and you know building something that we feel is the right uh is the right thing. The idea was to build something that can navigate and move inside indoor environment with certain uh ease without you know stop all the time. So we had to create you know ground clearance and strong wheels and strong gears and strong motors to support this movement. So we did a lot of uh you know lab tests, and since we are coming from a robotics business, so we had the good, let's say the uh the infrastructure to start with. So this was a very good starting point for uh for Okiba because we had the equipment, we had the lab, we had the environment, we had the connections to a lot of the vendors for you know this industry. So for us, it was like a really rapid prototyping, and we took it quickly to the to the job site. So and this is maybe the the the it's interesting to say that none of us had construction experience. Even though we had these connections to some uh construction companies uh very early, we're not coming from uh you mentioned that you know family businesses are in the construction. We're not a construction uh family, we're a robotics family. But we've teamed up with really good and reputable companies within the Israeli market, so they gave us this this uh environment and uh the job sites to the job sites to bring our first prototypes. And I think this was part of the the reason we we moved very quickly. We had the equipment, we had the robotics know-how, and now we have the the playground and the right partners. So we did we had like you know dozens of calls and uh meetings with with construction companies, and we kind of started to identify what are they looking for, what are the the ideal product that they seek, and this is what we built. We haven't built something that is you know disconnected from uh from the environment. Small team, hands-on, everyone are very uh technical, and uh even though I'm personally not a technical guy, I think I I gain a lot of uh experience both in you know robotics, components, and of course construction and the finishing uh processes.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Okay, so you brought up the the market that you you know were you know, obviously you guys were roboticists, and then you know, bringing that into the AEC industry, and there's the there's this common thread of family business, right? Across the the two markets, as it were. Uh,

Quick ROI Through Multi-Task Utilization

SPEAKER_00 17:02

but you described, you know, the rewinding back to you know the thing you said off the top, you talked about the market as being conservative, it has you know a low margin kind of like you know, business, and you know you're you're seeking to build trust quickly and and deliver results quickly. I I guess maybe talk some more about like how you've you know you you said that you're you're a less technical member of the team. I guess maybe like you know, leading with that idea of okay, you're selling to a conservative market, you're selling into a market that has low margins, you're selling into a a market that expects things to work, right? On the first go, right? There's there's this is not a this is not a place to test or experiment, right? No, we have this this drywall has to go on the wall and we need to move on to the next job tomorrow, right? Uh how do we you know deliver that that quick ROI? Like what has been your experience of working in that environment, especially in a a place where okay, the the robot doesn't necessarily do it the first time, first go perfectly.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

So I think, as I mentioned, it took us a lot of time to build this this solution, and we've came up with a robot that is multi-purpose robot that a robot can do a lot of uh tasks within this uh this finishing uh and painting process. So I think one of the things that you need in order to win this category is to have a robot that is fully utilized or with super high utilization. So it can work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, all through Friday, and every day do something within this finishing process that is evolving. Uh and this is what we build. We build a robot on on the first day, you bring it, and immediately it starts, you know, apply the mud on the joints. The second day, it sends it, uh, you know, bringing a very smooth surface, uh, second coat, third coat, again sending. We can apply the mud on the entire boards afterwards for a complete level five finish. We can prime and paint afterwards. So every day you see that the robot has something to do. And it helps the you know, it it helps create this kind of reliability and trust between the teams and the robot because one of the things that the industry hates to do is to buy something and then put it on the storage or work with it only on you know a few days of the week. So this is what we built. We've built uh a platform that has multiple tasks, multiple heads that are easy to swap. On the first day, you integrate mudbox, on the second day, you integrate sending head, on the third day you spray, on the fourth day you send again, and and so on and so on. And this is how you build this, you build this trust. Uh, it's very easy to change between the tasks, it's very easy to change with between applications, same as you handle your smartphone, you just you know press some button on the on the touch screen, you move from sending spraying application, tape application, and and so on. And this creates exactly the things that I've that I've told that I told you about earlier. And again, it's not that it's you know free of uh of troubles or free of uh of faults because it's it it is quite uh you know complex hardware and uh and software, but the fact that the operators or you know the tapers and the painters that runs the robots can handle it pretty quickly. While the robot is working, they can grab their you know their their knife or their spatula and you know do some work while the robot is working. I think that adds to the to this ROI that I that I mentioned, that it's coming right out of the truck, robot immediately starts work. The person who runs it knows what to do, has it the time to complete what the robot cannot do, and at the end of the day, they count the square footage, they count you know, the results. Of course, another nice thing that we add to this to this industry that is lacking is data. We collect a lot of data, we know exactly how many square footage were covered every day, how many gallons went through the pump, how many times the robot was working, how many minutes it was in uh in error state, and we provide a daily report to the users with access to dashboards. So this is kind of interaction, you know, from a managerial level that has another layer of reporting, of information, of data, and allowing them to analyze the performance and you know plan so they know that a certain task takes them X amount of time, the amount of uh of material, and they can plan and they can bid and they can you know manage their workforce and their resources in the right manners that you know help them win more more projects and you know be more cost efficient.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Okay.

Team Sport From Owner To GC

SPEAKER_00 22:10

I think this is the moment where I'm gonna invite us to zoom out, right? Because the theme of the AC summit this year is teamwork. Project success is a team sport. And I'm hearing you rhyming with our theme when you're talking about operators and robot teamwork. You're also talking about data leveling up to help decision making, you know, like with you know project managers and engineers and like management level people making decisions based on the data. I guess maybe I want to invite you to think even broader about the industry as a whole, even as it like touches on what Akibo is attempting to do for its clients. Um, what does that mean to you when we say that that project success is a team sport?

SPEAKER_01 22:56

For me, it's uh it's understanding that the entire value chain needs to align and need to understand that we now have robots, we now have this, you know, technology available on site. So we we need the owner to be part of it, we need the GC to be part of it. Of course, the subcontractors who we sell to are are part of it. So we we feel like and this is what we see we've seen in the past couple of years, especially since we started our operation in the United States, that there is much more involvement, much more interest from the entire value chain to make this successful. Because if the general contractor doesn't care about you know having a robot in the field, it won't it won't succeed. It won't succeed because the subcontractor needs to have like you know, clear workflow, need to have a lot of walls and ceilings to cover, and if the GC doesn't allow it to happen, it will break. So, and and of course the owners, if they understand that they have this access to this data, for example, and they have this access to this technology, and this technology allows them to improve schedule, to improve the safety of the of the people. So everyone gets some some benefit. So but if we don't see this commitment, probably this this this is where we you know brought the robots to the site, but the project manager was very reluctant to have this running because you know for whatever reason he he had on on site, he wanted to see things going in his way. So it was unsuccessful. So again, it's it's a team, it's a team sports, as I think one of the themes of this uh this summit. And so it's not only the painting team, right? It's the broader team that are involved with other trades, with the GC, with uh owners supervising, and you know, having uh this allowing the the technology to come and to be part of this uh this process. This this is how we see it, and this is I think one of the keys to to success in this.

Closing Thoughts And How To Attend

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Well, that's that's a fantastic way to close here in the Dab. I I think there is this sense that each individual part of a project could optimize for their own success instead of the project. And it's awesome to see you connecting the dots all the way back to the owner because you know, in the end, right, the this this construction project needs to be operated, right? It needs to be occupied, right? It's gonna be owned, right, and and then used by the the people that that need this building. So thank you for connecting the dots all the way back there and really appreciate you coming on the podcast to to learn out loud with us here and for being with us uh in Brooklyn at the Wayland on October 19th. And we hope you listener to see you there as well. Uh check us out at aecsummit.co. Uh we'd love to uh continue the conversation and uh you know, again, lean into uh teamwork and and project success being uh a group effort. Thanks again, Navab.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Thank you, Tyler.