The Dan Show
The Dan Show is a straight conversation series hosted by Dan O'Toole, founder and CEO of Arrive AI.
Dan believes investors, partners, and the public deserve real answers, not polished corporate messaging. Each episode covers where the company stands, what autonomous delivery actually looks like in the field, and what it takes to build a new kind of infrastructure. The wins and the setbacks both.
Topics run across innovation, entrepreneurship, logistics, AI, and the systems moving deliveries today.
No script. No filter. Just a direct look at the decisions shaping how things get delivered.
The Dan Show
We Are The Solution To The Asynchronous Problem
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A drone delivered food in under 3 minutes. The order took 30 minutes to get inside the drone.
Evan Furnish, Product Manager of Integrations at Arrive AI, went to Dallas to observe autonomous delivery in the field and came back with a very clear picture of where the whole industry is breaking, and exactly where Arrive AI fits.
He also visited Purdue University to observe Starship robots in action. Average order time: 45 minutes. The first 30 minutes were before the food ever got inside the robot.
The delivery is fast. The handoff is the problem. That is what Arrive AI is built to solve.
In this episode Dan and Evan cover:
What Evan observed in Dallas and at Purdue
Why drone and robot delivery is slower than it looks from the outside
What Starship's exit from 60 US campuses means for the industry
How the Arrive Point solves the synchronization problem
Why 100% interoperability is the only way autonomous delivery scales
What it is like to live near a live Arrive Point deployment at Hancock Regional Hospital
Arrive AI (NASDAQ: ARAI) is building the infrastructure for autonomous delivery. The Arrive Point is a secure, climate-controlled smart delivery endpoint that works with drones, ground robots, and human couriers. It is deployed today at Hancock Regional Hospital in Greenfield, Indiana.
Learn more: https://www.arriveai.com
Investor relations: ARAI.IR@allianceadvisors.com
Arrive AI is redefining logistics with innovation and purpose. Visit us at arriveai.com to explore AI-powered autonomous delivery systems for modern businesses.
Introduction
Evan FurnishBut there's definitely certain shortcomings with drone delivery in of itself. A a big way is that it's hard to know whether or not you're in a drone delivery zone. When I was down there, it took a lot of hunting and searching to see where this service was offered. So that was super interesting to see that something that from the outside appears so seamless. From the inside, there's still a lot of humans touching and going to the stores. There's a lot of stuff.
Dan O'TooleWhat I would have done if I were a DoorDash, I would have gotten a fleet of Corvette ZR worms. And I would have had people go really fast to wherever they were picking that up, rush back, get it on that drone so you could beat the conventional time.
Evan FurnishYeah. That's what they're doing wrong. That's yeah, I think the Corvette would be a little bit overkill, but maybe you know, maybe a Tesla model as plat. You know, maybe if they want to be a little bit more eco, eco-friendly.
Dan O'TooleAnd sadly, Kylie's not here today, and she's not gonna be back, unfortunately. So you guys are gonna have to endure with just me. But we gotta keep moving on, wish her the best. Uh she went to Salesforce and uh she's no doubt gonna be running that company sometime soon.
Company updates: 57 employees, New Orleans conference, new HQ signage
Dan O'TooleSo uh maybe we'll get in a partnership with uh uh Salesforce due to Kylie. So Kylie, if you're out there watching this, bring us in. Just want to give an update. Today I'm gonna be talking to Evan Furnish on our team. He's in charge of uh integrations, so it's gonna be exciting to hear uh an update from him. I can't wait to uh learn what he's got going on as we all get to hear uh real time what's happening here. So just a quick uh couple of bullet points I want to hit you with, and then I'm gonna introduce Evan. So I'm happy to report that we are up to 57 employees here at Arrive AI. I think that's a big number. Uh the trajectory has been going up, and that's exciting. Uh, just got some really world-class people here. We're doing it all in-house with all the relevant uh disciplines, AI, informatics, mathematicians, uh, and all of our engineering. So um we just came back from a conference in New Orleans, uh, focused on um campus and university food at colleges and universities throughout the country. There's some big automated use cases that are emerging there. We we're gonna be a part of that here at Arrive AI. That's really amazing. If you walked in the door here and saw what we were doing, you would be blown away. So if you're an investor in Arrive AI and you want to get a tour, hit us up. If you're looking for a great sign, pun intended, we just put a new very large sign on the Arrive AI building here in Fishers, Indiana. We got uh great feedback. People didn't know where we were located, and they saw our world-class headquarters because we had our signage and uh we had an opportunity. Uh there's one part of the building that didn't have a sign. We got to bit get the biggest sign that we've had so far, and it so that's that's an exciting moment for us. So got a lot of stuff that will be coming out, it's gonna be very exciting. I want you to stay tuned for that. So appreciate everybody. Uh, I'm gonna introduce Evan now and uh stay tuned. Hey Evan, thanks for joining today. Our next guest, Evan Furnish. Uh, first time we've had a guest in this format because it's it's
Meet Evan Furnish, Product Manager of Integrations
Dan O'Toolejust me. It is truly the Dan show now. Because you don't see Kylie here anymore, right? Yeah. So uh we were always competing. It she said it was a Kylie show. I said it's the Dan show. So, but uh sorry missing Kylie, but so you're stuck with me, Evan. How are you okay with that?
Evan FurnishOh yeah, yeah, that's fine with me. I like the whole setup here. It's quite the professional, professional gateway back.
Dan O'TooleWell, let's not get ahead of ourselves, right? Okay, so you're product manager of integration here at Arrive AI, right? That's right. So why don't you tell us uh tell the tell our investors and shareholders what you do and and where we're going. Give us a give us an update.
Evan FurnishYeah, absolutely. So with our product, which is a platform network product, there are not just simple customers that we're going to and selling on a one-off basis. We have to take into account all the different shareholders and stakeholders inside of our ecosystem that we're building. So when we look at all the autonomous drone providers and rover providers, we have, you know, retailers and we have municipalities and all these different players in the system. And so instead of just focusing on a one-off application for one customer, for integrations, we need to take the whole picture into account, right? So working with the hardware team, the software team on the product side of things, I'm kind of the connective tissue between what we're building and then our go-to-market team, who's having these conversations with our potential customers and customers that we have.
Dan O'TooleYou've been traveling too. You've been, I know you went to Den or um Dallas, right?
Evan FurnishYeah, yeah.
What Evan observed in Dallas
Evan FurnishI went to Dallas. Checked out what's going on out there. And yeah, absolutely. So Dallas is definitely the ground floor for where autonomous networks are being proven out. It's kind of the proving ground in a lot of ways. Um, Indiana as well, in the drone alliance, this is going to be a place as well that's going to have autonomous vehicles. But that was a really cool experience. So basically, I was able to go all throughout the northern part of Dallas over to the Plano side as well, kind of more on the eastern side of things. And I was able to observe what was going on there today.
Dan O'TooleYou got some good nuggets that you came back home with too, right?
Evan FurnishOh, yeah, absolutely. So outside of like the Whataburger or you know, in and out that I was able to have when I was down there that we don't have up here. And when you like see drone delivery online, what a lot of people see is just the they just see the part where the drone's flying and they're dropping a package off on a sidewalk or in somebody's yard. And you know, it looks very futuristic. When I was going through the DoorDash app, right, I wanted to get a Whataburger order. When I went in, I had the option for a drone or a human delivery. The drone delivery actually had a longer estimated time than the human delivery. And that, you know, that doesn't, my mind like that doesn't make a lot
The DoorDash drone delivery experience
Evan Furnishof sense. Drones are everyone wants the drone. Right, right. So what happened was very interesting. So I went and observed the actual procedure that they had going on. What would happen was whenever somebody would place an order, a person would get in their car, they would drive to the restaurant, they would pick up the food, then they would drive back, then they would have to unlock the drone area, they would have to go over to the drone, often put it in a different box than what it came in, then they would have to wait for the drone to fly up, prepare it, and then they would do the delivery. So, really, what they were doing was just adding more process steps just for the feature of getting the drone there. But as soon as the drone took off, it was less than three minutes to where I was staying. But there's definitely certain shortcomings with drone delivery in of itself. A big way is that it's hard to know whether or not you're in a drone delivery zone. When I was down there, it took a lot of hunting and searching to see where this service was offered. So that was super interesting to see that something that from the outside appears so seamless. From the inside, there's still a lot of humans touching and going to the stores.
Dan O'TooleThere's a lot of what I would have done if I were a DoorDash, I would have gotten a fleet of Corvette ZR1s and I would have people go really fast to wherever they were picking that up, rush back, get it on that drone so you could beat the conventional time.
Evan FurnishYeah. That's what they're doing wrong. That's yeah, I think the Corvette would be a little bit overkill, but maybe, you know, maybe a Tesla model S plat. You know, maybe if they want to be a little bit more eco, eco-friendly.
Dan O'TooleHey, now you came from the uh lawnmower business, American lawnmower. Yeah. Established in the 1800s, right?
Evan FurnishYes, yeah, 1895.
Dan O'TooleAnd if I remember right, you when you got there, you took the company from like 300 SKUs to 3,000 or something like that.
Evan FurnishIt was, it was, yeah, it was a 10x. So it was like uh 200 to 2,000. Wow. Yeah, yeah.
Dan O'TooleMan, that's that's what where are we gonna end up here now that we have the R2? I don't know.
Evan FurnishI mean, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do thousands of units, though. But um, no, but the big part of the work that I did there was enabling the company to scale, um, especially with global manufacturing and everything associated with that. Companies are just looking for sources. It was a lot in garden business, so like shovels and different hand trials and things like that.
Dan O'TooleIt's the old push mower that yeah, right?
Evan FurnishYeah, so that's the bread and butter, and that's what they did for years. And so when things started to go global, they started offering other products and services. And we had a product there that a shovel that was very popular, it had IP around it and everything associated with it. And customers love that shovel. So they asked, what else can we build? Right, right. And so what I did is I stepped in and I built a system and a process that allowed us to scale exponentially the products that we're offering so we could go to the different customers. Often it was, you know, in the private label context, but offering them um access to the manufacturing that we had and scale there.
Dan O'TooleLet's talk about something serious that everyone wants to know about. I heard the Colts are getting Mike Tomlin here. Is there any truth to that? I know you're I you're a big Pittsburgh guy. The only reason I'm gonna bring that up is because if we get Mike Tomlin, that could be good, maybe.
Evan FurnishI is I that would be unbelievable. I will say as a Steelers fan, there's a lot to be thankful for with Mike Tomlin, but I can't say I'm completely upset that uh we're going a different direction. Oh, I hear it.
Dan O'TooleHe was there a long time and didn't really get it done over the years.
Evan FurnishYeah, yeah. You know, I want results. You know, it's not I'm not in for uh, you know, uh index fund. I'm not trying to get 500 every year. I want those exponential wins. I want now you're talking arrive. That's exactly it.
Dan O'TooleSee how I brought that back? Yeah, that's right. Talk about some wins that we're you're gonna be seeing here really soon.
The Starship and Purdue discovery
Evan FurnishI'll stay at a high level, but I think I I did research at Purdue, so I'll take a step back. At Purdue, there's a uh AMR robotic service that was doing deliveries there. And so I went up there. We can talk about Starship, right? Yeah, that's Starship. People knew who that is, right? Yep, Starship. And I was observing their order processes. And what I found out when I was at Purdue's campus is that Starship, if let's say I'm on the app and I place an order, Starship does not transmit that order to the restaurant until the rover is physically parked outside of the restaurant. And what that means was the average order time is about 45 minutes. In our observations, the first 30 minutes were uh before the food even got inside the AMR. Wow. Right? So the back end was quick. It's the same with the drone. Autonomous mobile robot for those of you at home. Yeah, yeah, AMR. Sorry, yeah. We get into the acronyms here, right? That's right. You know, you're you're not a serious businessman if you can't speak in, you know.
Dan O'TooleI tried to do a whole paragraph with just all acronyms, but nobody could understand me.
Evan FurnishIt'll just sound like me saying the ABC is it'll be alphabet suit. But what I saw was seeing that, that there's so much lag on that front end that there would be a huge uh benefit to putting a rive point in that system, right? Sure. So imagine that order could instantly be transferred to the restaurant as soon as it's placed. And because it the food could be stored in a location that is secure, that is heated, cooled, all those different things, and then we can receive it from a we can transmit that to a rover, and then the rover can complete the leg. And that I think we can take that 45 minutes down to 30. And with that, you can just imagine the utilization and throughput that those rovers can experience.
Dan O'TooleSo I think we can even do better than that, right? If we can pick this stuff up and be located close by with all these AMRs and and get it there, get you your notification. Yeah, I I think um uh Starship just announced they're pulling out of all 60 campuses here in the US. And it's it's the asynchronous problem, right? The unattended. If if you have an arrive point in that ecosystem,
The asynchronous handoff problem
Dan O'Toolethat's the oil of the whole ecosystem, allowing everything to keep moving in motion. And when you when you don't have that, you're waiting on the robot or the robot's waiting on you. I kind of look at it like a doctor's appointment. If you go to the first appointment in the morning, the doc's probably on time. Yeah, and by the end of the day, the guy's like two hours ride, right? Yeah, and that's that's what's happening. It's hard to scale without a Rive. So uh, you know, that void is going to be filled by somebody. Um, hopefully uh they recognize where we're coming from, and that's gonna be a big opportunity uh for Rive AI.
Evan FurnishUh I totally agree. And that's just a single use case, right? When we're talking about campus delivery, there's all forms of you know economics to that whole ecosystem. But I think the opportunity lies is that that campus does not exist in the vacuum, it's not in the bubble. There are other restaurants, there are other uh you know, suburban neighborhoods around those areas that may want access to the restaurants on campus, or you're on campus, you want access to restaurants off campus, right?
Dan O'TooleRight.
Evan FurnishSo with an arrive point, that's when we start seeing plugging private networks into other networks, and then we're creating the public network and we're creating this scalable solution that can start offering new use cases and services that weren't available to the product.
Dan O'TooleTalk about our target is 100% interoperability, right? So if you're a partner on the Arrive AI network, you're gonna be in that 100%, right? So what that's why I think it's a uh we're gonna pick winners and losers here at Arrive AI. You know, you're either gonna be lead, follow, or get out of the way, right? Is all I could say. So what do you how do you view that?
Evan FurnishAbsolutely. So I view it as we are trying to enable them to do their jobs better, right? That's the whole benefit of a network. We are a seamless integration to what they're doing to allow them to get their economics quicker. But when we're talking about interoperability, that's when we provide the value, right? Because you name the drone company, you name the AMR, the rover company, they're trying to just optimize for their specific solutions.
100% interoperability and the Arrive Point network
Evan FurnishThere are people that are trying to design their own different, you know, mailbox type of applications, but those only serve the companies that put them in there. You know, if it's a zipline point, they just want it to work with Zipline. If it's a wing point, they just want to work with Wing, you can name all the different providers. But when we're talking about 100% interoperability, what we're trying to do there is say that no retailer or property manager or business park has to lock into a single service from a single company. You know, restaurants today they can have their food delivered from DoorDash, Uber Eats, their own delivery drivers. They have optionality there. But the infrastructure isn't there to allow the optionality and autonomous delivery. And that's what we bring. We're the infrastructure layer that uh provides the optionality and the network effect.
Dan O'TooleIt's just like the charging network for Ford EVs, GM EVs, and Tesla, right? They all started with their own end-to-end solution and they realized they needed a horizontal network to really supply and support uh great innovation and ubiquity everywhere. And so Arrive AI is is the horizontal network of autonomous delivery. You agree with that? Oh, absolutely. Okay, we're gonna keep you on the payroll there.
Evan FurnishOkay, good. Hope so. Hope so. Right. Yeah, can you just imagine having a different mailbox for every different package that you receive? Yeah, you're trying to go outside and you can't even see, right? What we're solving here is not just the first factor problem, right? A lot of people think that the first factor problem is just autonomous delivery. And that's the problem.
Dan O'TooleRight.
Evan FurnishWhat we're looking at and we're solving, we're skating to where the puck's going. Uh, I know you're a hockey fan, right? So we're we're trying to make sure that the second and third factor problems that will emerge at scale are already solved. And that's that's where we, I think we provide special value because everybody's just looking in their own their own swim lane, but it's when you span the different swim lanes and you start seeing, okay, they're in these trenches. How do we connect the trenches?
Dan O'TooleHey, Evan, you you're from Fishers, Indiana, right? You're born here. Now you're living down in Hancock County, which is where our first essential customer is, Hancock uh health down there. Um, so uh where are you gonna move to next?
Living near Hancock Regional Hospital, Final Thoughts And Sign-Off
Evan FurnishNo. Yeah, you know, we're looking at properties all over the place. No, yeah, yeah. I grew up here locally, so I remember when all of this was cornfields, you know. I remember before the uh Top Golf came in, IKEA and everything in this area, um, played basketball down the street. It was this was all just fields a little while ago.
Dan O'TooleSomeday people are gonna say I remember when IKEA, Top Golf, and Arrive Aya came in.
Evan FurnishThat's exactly right. That's exactly right.
Dan O'TooleBecause we're right between this, right?
Evan FurnishYeah, I mean there's a lot of Fisher's Pride. I just I think it's so cool that there's a NASDAQ traded company in my hometown in tech and artificial intelligence. It's and you work at it too. Yeah, and I work at it too, right? Oh, there's that. Yeah, so I watched this place go from cornfields to what it is today. Then now I'm in Hancock County, which is a lot more cornfields than Fisher's is now. But yeah, my wife and I live down there and we're part of the Hancock network. And knowing that's one of our deployments, it was really just a surreal experience being on the business side of things, being here, watching everything that we're doing, also being on the customer side of things, seeing all the different applications and use cases that we could have. It kind of just puts perspective on everything. And I think that's what they do well, is that they are a very humanizing hospital system. They really care not only about the uh patients at the system, but they also care about their doctors and their nurses, and seeing that they're willing to invest in a technology that's able to return those nurse hours back to the nurses so they can stay bedside and everything like that. I think it just speaks to their culture, and it's cool that Arrive AI is able to enable them to deliver better service, in which I'm on the receiving end of that too. So it's a win-win.
Dan O'TooleThat was awesome. Yeah. Uh Hancock, Steve, and Matt couldn't couldn't do better than those guys. So yeah, good shout out for them. Oh, yeah, absolutely. All right, man. Well, hey, I appreciate your taking time out. Go get back to work, man. Let's let's turn out some stuff today. So this time let's do something. All right. Okay. Thanks, Evan. Yep.
