Billion Dollar Success To Robotic Frontier | Lucas Ngoo, Cortex AI Founder

In this episode of The Jess Larsen Show on Innovation & Leadership, Jess sits down with Lucas Ngoo, CEO of Cortex AI and co-founder of Carousell, the Southeast Asian marketplace that grew to a $1 billion valuation.

Lucas explains why the next major leap in AI may not just be chatbots or software, but general-purpose robotics. While robot hardware is getting cheaper and more powerful, Lucas argues that the biggest bottleneck is still data: the real-world human and robot data needed to train machines to operate safely, precisely, and intelligently in everyday environments.

Jess and Lucas dive into how Cortex AI is building the data infrastructure for robot brains, collecting human task data from industries like factories, retail, restaurants, hotels, and other real-world environments. They also explore why robots may follow a path similar to Waymo, starting with human supervision and gradually improving until autonomy becomes invisible and widespread.

Lucas also shares the lessons he learned from building Carousell from three founders out of school into a billion-dollar company, including how to hire during rapid growth, survive startup chaos, raise capital, choose the right investors, and recognize technologies that are just becoming possible.

This is a forward-looking conversation about robotics, AI, entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley ambition, and what it really takes to build the future before the rest of the world sees it coming.

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