Rabbit Sells 130,000 R1 Units, Says Early Bugs Mostly Fixed

AI hardware maker Rabbit’s CEO said the company has now sold 130,000 of its R1 units and that usage of the R1 is doubling every two weeks.

While AI software and service startups are taking off like rockets, AI-specific hardware startups like Rabbit and Humane, with its AI Pin, have had a much tougher time. Humane has been called a flop by The NY Times after selling perhaps 10,000 AI Pins, and the company is reportedly trying to sell itself. Rabbit wasn’t well received by the tech reviewer crowd either, but the sales results for the R1 have been different, according to the CEO.

“We were expecting to sell 10,000 units,” Jesse Lyu said at Collision Conference in Toronto. “We’re now at 130,000 units worldwide.”

He added that most tech reviewers received an early version of the R1 product, causing reviews like “fairly useless” or “over-hyped.” The company is on a one-week update cadence, however, and “most of the early reviewers’ concerns have already been addressed,” he said.

The R1 is a $199 pocketable gadget with a tiny touchscreen, a mic to speak to, and a camera to capture visual information. It connects to AI services over cellular or Wi-Fi, answering your questions but also taking actions on your behalf.

One usage example Lyu shared was San Francisco parking, which often has multiple signs with varying conditions for different days and times governing when you’re allowed to park. He recently pointed Rabbit at the sign forest and asked: can I park here? Another is a spreadsheet of data: point Rabbit at it and ask it to transposed columns and rows, or otherwise manipulate the data, and you’ll get an email with the result.

Both of those, of course, are marginal use cases.

If you’re working on a spreadsheet, you’re probably on a laptop or at least a phone, where you can ask competing services to do similar things and receive the result immediately, not in an email.

But Lyu is convinced that we need non-phone and non-app access to AI. And he’s convinced that he’s not alone in that.

“We didn’t create the hype,” he said. “People are genuinely looking for something new.”

He understands it will take some time, but says that just like the first car took much longer to start up than a horse, and was slower as well, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have built cars and kept riding horses. Asked if he would change anything about the launch, Lyu answered in the negative, but added he would try to manage expectations better.