Let’s all get on the same page. Vacuuming is the worst. It just is. I don’t know a single person who likes it. Walk around your house and suck up dirt? I actively avoided it as a chore growing up. Give me the Windex and paper towels. Kitchen duty. Anything but walking room to room trying to find the optimal plug so I don’t have to move the cord from one outlet to the next.
And maybe you hated it so much that you tried a Roomba. Or one of its copycats. It’s fine. Nothing special. You used it a lot at first. You were vacuuming less, so you were okay with it. But you still had to vacuum. Then you forgot about it. Not because vacuuming went away. Because it got stuck under your couch and died two months ago.
And you were probably happy about it. Tired of it doing an okay job and ramming your furniture. But that sent you right back to a chore you don’t like. So is there an alternative? Hire cleaners? Sure. But they’re expensive and only come every once in a while. What else? Surely there’s another option.
You bet your ass there is.
Introducing Matic. A robot cleaner that actually does the job. One that works on demand at the sound of your voice, cleans up everything from spilled milk to dog hair, and most importantly, doesn’t get stuck under the couch.
Okay but how
Your old robot vacuum was basically going around your house blindfolded with its arms out. Like you do when you get up in the middle of the night.
Bump, spin-around, bump, spin-around.
Matic is different. It has five cameras and sees your home whether the lights are on or not. On day one, it rolls itself out of the box and starts moseying around your house. After 15–20 minutes, it has a 3D map of your place. Kitchen, living room, bathrooms. It knows which surfaces are rugs or carpet and which are hard floors. The whole nine yards.
Then it gets to work. Matic zooms around cleaning hard floors and carpets without bumping into every piece of furniture. The bag for the mess it picks up and the water for mopping both live inside the robot. The dock you plug into the wall is just for charging, so there’s no bulky contraption sitting in your mudroom.
Once Matic scans your home, you get a 3D version of it in the app, so you can see what Matic sees. Label your rooms, tap an area for a deeper clean, or set it to run at a specific time.
Now, is it uploading a 3D copy of your home to some server? Nope. The mapping happens on the robot itself, so your floor plan stays between you and the bot.
And like Impulse, Matic packed in hardware it wasn’t fully using yet, so it can add features through software updates.
Which brings me to my nieces and nephews, who love throwing food on the floor as much as eating it. Phone not handy? Not a problem. Yell “Hey Matic, clean this,” point at the mess, and it strolls over to get to work. Will you use it every day? Probably not. But is it cool? Definitely.
The guys who started it
Mehul Nariyawala & Navneet Dalal. Two guys who are just doers. They’ve never raised money off a pitch deck. They build the thing first, then go ask for money. Showing up with the receipts.
The two have been in the computer vision game for quite some time. In 2010, they built Flutter, an app that let you control iTunes and Spotify with hand gestures through your webcam. My brain went straight to the glove-dancing people.
What may have seemed like a gimmick to some hit #1 in 72 countries on the Mac App Store. And in 2013, they sold it to Google for ~$35M.
At Google, they worked on Nest. Yes, the company Mill’s Matt Rogers co-founded, which we covered in Issue #33. Funny how the world works.
Mehul ran the Nest Cam lineup, and Navneet led the computer vision behind it. Then in 2017, they left to start Matic. The last company they ever want to work on. And they mean it. Early on while they were working out of Mehul’s house, Navneet wrote “Not For Sale” on a sheet of paper and taped it up as a reminder. Pretty badass move if you ask me.
They also put up some serious dough. Roughly 70% of their net worth, and no plan B (highly recommend this podcast with the two gents). Talk about conviction. Mehul’s father even told him to sell his house if he had to, just to keep Matic alive.
If I were a betting man, I’d bank on these guys. Navneet? Mehul? How about opening up the next round to Left Field? We probably wouldn’t even show up as a rounding error, but it sure would be fun.
The honest take
It’s expensive. $1,495. And I know this is a luxury item, like the bin from Mill we covered (which started at $999). But everyone needs to clean their home.
And if you’re not paying for cleaners, you’re getting the vacuum out yourself. That’s not a problem, it’s just a tradeoff. Not everyone can afford a $1,500 autonomous vacuum, I get that. But for those who can, the tradeoff you’re making today is your time.
Have a couple of dogs? You’re probably vacuuming a couple of times a week. I can see the case for a purchase like this if (a) it saves you time during the week, (b) it saves you from a chore you truly hate, and (c) you like having a clean home. Will you never touch a vacuum again? No. But could Matic cut your vacuuming way down? I think so. Sure, you might skip a vacation this year to afford it, but the everyday benefit of not touching a vacuum may be worth it.
And it not getting stuck under your couch is a good and bad thing. It’s ~8 inches tall, so it can’t get stuck down there, but also can’t clean down there. That’s still your job.
Reviews are also split. WIRED gave it a 10/10, while other reviewers & customers say it struggles with corners and edges. GOOD NEWS is that’s a software problem, not a hardware one. And per the Matic team, which is very active on Reddit, they’re working on those improvements.
Last thing. New tech usually means a higher price, and the hope is that scale brings it down. So far, it’s gone the other way. Matic was $1,095 last year and has gone up since — tariffs and rising part costs. The saving grace… you get six months to try it risk-free.
If they pull this off
A Matic in millions of homes across the world, cleaning your house so you don’t have to. (And to my future kids, who may be lucky enough to have a robot helper around the house: don’t worry, a robot can’t spread mulch. Your Saturday mornings are still mine.) You get a clean home and the time back from not doing it yourself.
Mehul said it perfectly on this podcast: “We don’t want to collaborate with the robot; we want to delegate.” Preaching to the choir.
Matic is solving more than the dirt on your floors. The real problem they’re taking on is vision inside your home. And any robot that comes down the line will have to solve it too. Can’t have a humanoid, or any robot for that matter, falling down the stairs or knocking over a lamp.
So floors are step one. But if Matic pulls this off, and this truly is the last company Mehul and Navneet ever work on, there’s a lot more in the pipeline.
Want to work out there?
25 open roles as of 10/22. Production, perception, supply chain, product, and marketing. You name it, they’ve got it. All onsite in Menlo Park and Mountain View, California.
And talk about a clean office. I can’t imagine there are any dust bunnies hanging around waiting for someone to vacuum them MANUALLY.
Open roles → https://maticrobots.com/careers
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