Leander Maerkisch

Instead of paying for email verification of leads, it's faster /cheaper/ better to just ask Claude to guess it.

Bella in her hotel room in Hartsville. Long way from Dubai. But the Southern hospitality made up for it. Thank you Ericka and the team at The Mantissa for the warm welcome.

After Dubai, I flew to Hartsville, South Carolina. Population: 7,500. The hotel general manager Ericka wrote a personal welcome letter. Not just for me. For Bella too.

Bella walking through a hotel lobby in Dubai. This is where she'll work one day.

Bella going for an evening walk in Dubai.

Bella by the pool in Dubai. She didn't swim. She was networking.

A family stopped to meet Bella outside Dubai Mall. This happened like every five minutes.

Avinav invited us to present our robot Bella in Dubai. While I was in the meeting room, my cofounder Satrajit was piloting the robot from our hacker house in New York. 11,000 km away. That's the product.

Bella found a restaurant in Dubai and started reading the menu. She has expensive taste.

Our robot Bella in front of the Burj Khalifa. She wasn't impressed. Too short.

Two weeks ago, we flew our robot to Dubai for a business trip. She traveled in a Pelican case. Made it through customs. Barely.

@Jawad52823Uf Yes!

@leander01_ Early-stage vibes: chaotic, cramped, and full of energy—robots, friends, and all.

Friday afternoon at the hacker house. Friends stop by. The robot is running. Someone's piloting the robot. My cofounder Satrajit is explaining the technology. This is what early-stage looks like. Chaotic, cramped, and weirdly fun.

This is Todd, a Microsoft engineer. He was showing his parents around Midtown when he spotted our robot. He stopped. Started asking questions. How does she work? Who's piloting her? Where's she going next? His parents kept walking. He didn't notice. When you build something people can't walk away from - that's signal.

Our robot spent an afternoon looking at 18th-century paintings through the window at Christie's. Somewhere between a museum visit and a product demo. This is what testing looks like when your lab is Manhattan.

This is what our robot pilot sees. She's in the Philippines. The robot is at Rockefeller Center. She walked through Times Square, visited FAO Schwarz, and stopped outside Christie's - all from her living room. No visa. No winter coat. No 14-hour flight. Just a laptop and a good internet connection.

Our robot walked into a café in Midtown. She browsed the menu. Studied the coffee beans. Considered her options. She didn't order. Robots don't drink coffee. Yet.

AI agents are already everywhere -- but most devtools weren't built for them. So we decided to do something about it. We ran Claude through each tool's getting-started guide and measured: → How fast it completed → How many tool calls it took → How many errors it hit → How much it cost ... that led to a final grade for how agent ready each tool is. See where your favorite tools landed → 2027.dev/arena

This gentleman built technology for some of the largest banks in the world. He stopped mid-walk to talk to our robot on a sidewalk near MoMA. Within minutes, he was smiling, chatting, asking her questions - like she was a person. That's the thing we keep seeing. People don't treat Bella like a machine. They treat her like someone they just met.

NBC Studios. Home of the Today Show, Saturday Night Live, and some of the biggest broadcasts in the world. We walked our robot right up to the front door. Nobody offered us a TV spot. Yet.