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Meet Savana: Episode 2: Creating Radley Robots – Leaning into her Ecosystem

On Creating a Radley Robot Prototype - A Customer-Centric View

Savana Radley’s personal experience with her recovery from a surgery, led her to ideate and create a solution for  people who may need assistance at home, or people who live alone – no matter what age or demographic cohort, or remote the location!  Her story about why she created Radley Robots is Featured in Episode 1: https://futurecite.com/opportunities-meet-savana-episode-1-the-ideation-of-radley-robots/

Savana wanted to create a robot to solve specific needs of people who require assistance – without the need for people to understand how to operate a computer or a laptop!

In Episode 2, we cover how she started up her venture by accessing her business and tech ecosystem in Calgary Alberta.

Her idea just happened to involving both humans and technology to create a special type of robot.  To take ideation to the next step of prototype building, she leaned into her community of colleagues and peers in the professional and tech community in Calgary Alberta.

 

 

She knew that to build her startup, she needed to access people to guide her along her entrepreneurial search for partners, advisors and consultants.  Savana shares her entrepreneurial journey in her blog.

Image Credit: Radley Robots

Savana’s Blog

There are many other robotics companies out there and lots of different options that solve specific issues – fall alert mechanisms, home security services, in-person care providers – but we see an opportunity for a human to use a robot almost like a Swiss Army Knife. You can equip a robot with particular capabilities and sensors in order to serve specific use cases, and enable the operator to be the decision-maker in how this tool is used. This project leverages technology to provide a very personal service, putting real people alongside real people to bring support and comfort safely for both.

In addition, we’re coming at this from a very customer-centric point of view – seeking to create an appliance that people want to have in their living space. We’re considering colour and form, how the robots move in the space, how we make it cool to have around – we kind of want to provide the KitchenAid of robots! Plus, they are available for a service fee, a rental. This means it’s much more affordable for both facility providers and individual consumers, making technology accessible to audiences who might otherwise not be able to take advantage of it. No one has to invest thousands of dollars to buy an appliance that will fall out of date as the technology advances.

About Savana Radley

Image Credit: S. Radley

Born in Australia, Savana moved with her family to England and then to Canada, spending most of her school years in Ontario. After working in Toronto in communications for several years, Savana moved to the UK to pursue a career in the performing arts in Europe before “accidentally” getting into technology in the late 1990s. After working in branding and advertising agencies on early online document sharing applications and media buying and analytics software for larger enterprise clients such as L’Oreal, Unilever and Air Canada, she had a brief interlude in recruitment before moving back to Canada in June 2006. On landing in Calgary, Savana started work at Evoco, a SaaS provider of construction and compliance management solutions to several retail customers including Walmart both in the US and globally. After Evoco was sold to Accruent late in 2012, Savana started working with NTT Data back in the UK, leading a large international Salesforce implementation for Vodafone. In 2014, Savana joined Benevity to help scale and structure their Client Services team as VP Client Services later that year. As a part of the leadership team at Benevity, Savana enjoyed seeing the company grow from 70 to 250 people in less than 24 months and was then offered a role at Deloitte Canada in their digital transformation group. It was in 2019, while Savana was at Deloitte, that she experienced her own loss of mobility as a result of spinal surgery. This started her thinking about how to address the challenges she had experienced, and how, as technologies converge there are opportunities to combine software and hardware to solve problems in our physical world.

About Radley Robots

Basic RGB

Radley Robots Inc. is an early startup officially incorporated on June 18, 2020 with an HQ in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.   Its vision is to provide a trusted companion to everyone who needs one.  Their current core team is small as they are partnering with several local and international firms to deliver on the first iteration of their vision. They have partnered with Ohmnilabs in California, for their telepresence robot first pilot, and are in conversations with other robot providers including CrossWing in Aurora, Ontario, with whom they expect to partner for the next round. They’re pleased to be working with Radley Founder’s colleagues at Deloitte Canada to help to evaluate the pilot’s success.  They also credit TELUS, who has volunteered some private network connectivity to ensure service provision in residences without Wi-Fi. Their robot operators are coming from The Virtual Gurus and Meschia Consulting has provided business analysis and to help develop their operational procedures.  Other consultants in their virtual consortia include The Digital Monk, Chris McBurney and Ellen Dungen.

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