Founder Demo: AJ Forsythe & Jordan Barnes of Coop

Key Takeaways

So Luther gave a great introduction. Um so the the purpose of coupe is uh how do we blend AI and smart home technology with uh backyard agriculture and present. Okay. Oh, there it is. And then I Brian present. And um and so like the goal of the company is building the world's largest decentralized food production network. I think we've seen uh specifically like in the last six months with eggflation just how like crazy uh everything is. Um, we can jump on. Yeah, now we're getting it. We're getting it. Uh, yeah. So, like I think we all understand like the price of eggs is has been insane. And, uh, so this year our customers will generate uh, between 3 to four million eggs from their backyard. Each coupe uh, generates about 1500 eggs. The average American eats about 290 eggs a year. And uh, we're going to go over how we're using AI to make it like super easy for anyone with a backyard to raise chickens. Um, hi I'm Jordan. I'm uh co-founders with AJ, also full tilt chicken person. So obviously eggs are it's pretty saturated topic right now. We're on the third round of Aven in a couple years, but it's something people are talking about and we believe and we see that it's really changing um there's a widespread different perspective on food and it's really a tangible moment for people and so this has been it's really timely topic for um a lot of these discussions. Uh totally. And so uh what what Coupe primarily is is we use battery powered cameras uh to like monitor everything that's going on in your backyard at any time. So we're contextually looking at uh are there predators? How many chickens do you have? Do you have eggs? Has like uh we do like remote chicken health monitoring. And about 13 million Americans raise chickens right now. It's about 3% of uh households. And our goal is to get to 10%. And yes, this is about chickens, but it's also not. We care super deeply about people having power over their plates and what does it mean to have autonomy when it comes to your plate which sound which sounds like cliche and visionary but it's very real and so again there's this tangible moment happening and our long-term goal and what really we started coupe is to just reconnect people with dirt under their feet on their plates using super smart tech and really change the food systems and so I the problem is is like largescale industrial farming uh it's centralized it's terrible for the animal health terrible for people that work there uh and it's just not a good uh scalable well it's scalable but it's not a good system. I think people are waking up to the idea that like you go to the grocery store and your food's actually poisoning you. And so we want like the end goal of coupe is how do we enable anyone with a backyard to actually start generating their own both produce and uh protein. And I don't think it's a debated topic that we don't love big poultry as we call them. And so there, you know, the conditions are great. The the the nutrition is garbage and there's another way. And we want to make that super accessible for anybody. You got a yard, you can have chickens. And uh so like average egg uh is about 45 to 60 days old, travels about a thousand miles in cold storage, uh comes from like uh large scale farms that the average hen has about one sheet of paper of space and it's just like it's just not a good system. Uh and then like backyard eggs on a non-monoculture diet, so like food scraps, bugs, uh grains, uh it's about 200% more uh nutritious value. Um, so, okay, everyone. And I'm going to do a quick trivia to get people wake waking up really quick. So, anybody know about the secret three-digit code on the side of every egg carton that's sold in the US? Nobody. Oh, that you're the first person who's ever known that you get eggs. He might be from Big Poultry. Yeah, maybe you're from Big Poultry. I apologize. Um, so there's a secret code that's um it's for the day of the year. So January 1st is 1, 365 is December 31st, and it is the day that the egg was handed off. There's a lot of Well, I don't want to waste our time. Come find me afterwards. When you get home, check that three-digit code, and that's uh how old your eggs are in your fridge. You'll be shocked. But uh let's get into the technology, though. Um so, uh we worked with the head designer or the original designer of Nest, a guy named Fred Bold. Uh and we designed a rotationally molded, uh coupe. It has an automatic door, two cameras, uh, and then we can do smart alerts. So, we can say, "Hey, Jordan, uh, your door is open. All four hens are out. Uh, and you have eight eggs that need to be collected." Um, and, uh, we just trademarked this, but it's a Esteein AI. Uh, this is like what's running in the background always. So, we've, uh, trained our model on about 26 million videos. Uh, so we we get like contextual clues of everything that's happening. Um, so and it's actually not just about chickens. Uh, it's about like, hey, is your yard underwatered? Is there a dog that is not your dog? We know the difference between if you have a dog or your neighbor's dog or your dog, you can mark safe animals. You can mark dangerous animals. And then we give a bunch of uh alerts that are like contextual what's going on with your flock. So the thesis is, you know, the slide you saw before felt a very familiar native iPhone experience. That is what it feels delightful. It's smart home tech. are our our customer submitts are very familiar with this. But on the back end, it's super sophisticated, intelligent tracking, and it really powers this ecosystem in your backyard that makes it it's fun, delightful, but it's also super it's super meaningful and a really, you know, meaningful part of your life. Um, so this gives like a little bit more context of like what our cameras are seeing and doing in the back end. Uh, so it's like, hey, there's giving confidence ratios of like, hey, what eggs need to be collected, what animals are in the frame. Uh what's crazy is we now know the difference between let's say you have 10 hens. We know the difference between hen one through 10 and we can say like hey Henrietta hasn't had water in uh six hours. You might want to check her out. Uh and so it's just kind of like AI for chicken tracking. Uh so this is like what we're doing on the on the back end. Uh we do a bunch of local processing and then we send it up to run inference on it and then we uh push a new model uh about once a week. Uh, and it's like it's actually like hardcore technology, but from a customer standpoint, you should never familiar and delightful. And what um, you know, a lot of AI models can they can do detection that's not super sophisticated, but they do they fail in real world environments often. Ours, it it has logic. It really thinks and so if it detects a raccoon, but it also knows that all chickens are inside and the door is closed, it can assign a really high confidence safety score to that. So, it's not just detecting, it's seeing, okay, this is safe or it is not. And if it's not, it can activate an alarm. So, it doesn't just detect and see an object. It reasons and it thinks and it acts, which is uh what one of our customers this morning, they had a bear attack their coupe last night and it's like, "Hey, all all chickens are safe, but uh there's a black bear outside, so just heads up." Just heads up. There's a little more deeper context about, you know, they this is obviously not as valuable to when we're talking to our consumers. It's just like, oh, I got cool egg alerts and oh, I have fresh eggs to collect. I can go make an omelette. This is really what we've um poured all of our investment and all of our focus into is really building this context awareness based in real world backyards and that you know really allows us to scale and change backyard food. Yeah. With with the goal of like decentralizing like I want millions of homes generating billions of eggs uh and disrupting that supply chain. Uh we're just about to push uh produce which we haven't um which we haven't talked about publicly. So this is great. Um uh so actually back to decentralization, we're going to enable all of our customers uh that wouldn't normally be chicken keepers to generate eggs and then we'll do partnerships with large retailers to sell into them. And we're in some retailers right now but through a different lens just for selling our coups. But this is a really interesting we talk you know farmtotable is not new but there's not it's it's not that crazy to think about what backyard to retail could look like as well and how I mean we have 36 chickens. We have eggs coming out of our ears. What, you know, I can only give so much to my grandand next door neighbor. And so what does that look like when these don't have to travel a 100 miles to a distributor then sit on a truck? That's a completely different system. It's it's big vision thinking, but it's pretty it's not that crazy. Like hyper local distribution where you're buying your produce and protein from your uh neighbors essentially or or you're generating it yourself. Uh so we're launching other verticals uh because like the model actually doesn't really care about chickens. Chickens is just a one or a zero. Um so we're launching uh produce, ducks, goats, rabbits. Uh and about 20% of our customers are currently doing that uh as it is. I don't think Okay. Uh I think we're we're This wasn't supposed to be in there. We have 10 seconds left. This is from space pitch we just did. Yeah. the uh like the the reason Jordan and I started the company is uh like I want to like we build decentralized food production here using semi-autonomous uh like production systems and AI and then uh we partner with SpaceX to feed all the people to like build all the food production systems for future colonies. So this actually isn't a joke like this is the goal of the company which is going to be awesome. This wasn't supposed to be in there. So thank y'all. Yay. Grace checks everyone. [Applause]