Meet The Startup Behind The Robot ‘Dogs’ Set To Patrol The Southern Border

Jiren Parikh, CEO of Ghost Robotics, dropped out of college to become a mountaineer, then wound up selling enterprise software. Today, he runs a Philadelphia-based company making four-legged robot “dogs” for the military and government agencies around the world (allies only), including Singapore, Australia and the U.K., as well as the U.S.

“It’s the easiest job I’ve had in my 38-year career,” says Parikh, 55. “I spent more of life trying to sell enterprise software. It’s not very appealing physically. You have a legged robot, it’s a lot easier.”

In early February, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was bringing robot “dogs” to the American Southwest to help with border patrol and anti-smuggling efforts. The futuristic quadrupeds weigh 100 pounds, can be equipped with video cameras or night-vision sensors, and traverse all types of terrain, including sand, rocks and hills. The high-profile contract put Ghost Robotics in the spotlight, but it’s just one of more than 25 customers the company has signed on since its 2015 founding. While Parikh won’t discuss many of them, the company has also debuted its robots at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida as part of a plan to replace stationary surveillance cameras.

Ghost Robotics’ robots, called Vision 60, cost $150,000, with specialized sensors or others add-ons increasing their final price. Forbes estimates the company’s revenue is in the range of $30 million to $40 million. While government customers represent almost all of sales today, Parikh believes that ultimately enterprise customers will prove a bigger market, as the costs of robots come down and applications like nuclear-plant security and safety inspections for factories proliferate.

“If we can’t get these things under $100,000, or even $75,000 or $50,000, we don’t know what we are doing.”

Parikh, an Indian immigrant, met cofounders Avik De and Gavin Kenneally through a friend who was familiar with work going on at the Penn Center for Innovation. De and Kenneally had been working on building a new version of a legged robot in the lab of Daniel Koditschek while working on their Ph.D.’s at the University of Pennsylvania. Parikh launched the company with De and Kenneally in 2015.

“They believed they could make a better robot than Boston Dynamics, which at the time was owned by Google. That’s a tough task. How do you beat somebody with deeper pockets?,” recalls Parikh. Today, while Boston Dynamics, known for its Spot videos, remains far larger, Ghost Robotics has also gained traction, especially in government contracts. Its technology uses motors to control the robot’s legs and adjust for changes in ground pressure. “It’s like a mammal walking through the woods,” Parikh says.

In the early days, Parikh financed operations for Ghost Robotics on his credit cards while De and Kenneally worked on the technology. After getting a first government contract, with the Defense Department, in 2017, the startup raised its first $1 million in venture funding. The company has since raised more, Parikh says, though neither Crunchbase or PitchBook show details and he declines to elaborate. “We haven’t raised much at all,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of people wanting to throw money at us. We’re very conservative.” 

Two and a-half years ago, Homeland Security’s research and development advisor, the Science and Technology Directorate, began working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Ghost Robotics to develop and test a robot for border patrol. To work at the borders, Ghost Robotics’ Vision 60 needed to be adapted to work in extreme weather conditions and remote areas. The robots provided to DHS operate from negative 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit) to 55 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), for example, and can withstand being submersed in water. They went through testing in Lorton, Virginia, then were shipped off to El Paso, Texas for further trials in tough environments. “We did a lot of work to satisfy DHS,” Parikh says. “It had never been done before in a basic robot let alone a legged robot.”

Ghost courted controversy last October when it introduced a robot dog outfitted with a sniper rifle by a company called Sword International at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. In early November, professor Koditschek wrote a letter to Parikh asking that his name and that of his lab be removed from the company’s website and promotional materials. “In part, my refusal to allow any further association with the new direction of your company reflects my uncertainty about when cheap, human packable, armed autonomous mobility crosses the line into violation of the international law of armed conflict. In contrast, I am certain that this integration of guns with the emerging agility and eventual ubiquity of small legged machines transgresses a crucial ethical barrier,” he wrote. The United Nations has long hosted discussions on how to address the use of lethal autonomous weapons, as activists like the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots have called for their ban.

Parikh says that he supports Ghost Robotics’ defense customers to outfit the robots as they see fit to keep people safe. Further, he says, the robot dogs with weapons are more akin to drones since they are not fully autonomous and require a remote human operator to make any decision to fire. “They put weapons systems on all sorts of autonomous tanks, autonomous track robots and aerial drones. What is a guided missile? It’s a robot. They’ve been around for a decade. We just happened to build a robot with legs,” Parikh says. “The idea that these robots are sentient beings and have AI to do whatever is silly.”

Longer term, Parikh believes that the bigger market for Ghost’s robots will not be the military, or even government overall, but enterprise—especially as costs of robots continue to come down along with prices of their component parts. The company is building out small and medium sized robots with different capabilities. The robots could be used for safety inspections in manufacturing plants, airport security, mine inspections or safeguarding nuclear power plants. Ghost Robotics is currently working on adapting its robots for many of these use cases. “It doesn’t matter how good that security guard is, they cannot compete with a $3,000 to $4,000 thermal sensor on top of our robot with video and AI. You cannot beat that.”

While cost has been a barrier to adoption of robots in industry, Parikh figures their costs will drop 25% to 50% (or more) over time. As he says: “If we can’t get these things under $100,000, or even $75,000 or $50,000, we don’t know what we are doing.”