Frustrated with the time, effort, and money required to maintain a decent-looking manicure, Renuka Apte used to joke about how she’d invent something where she would put her hand in a contraption and when she removed them, her nails would be done. “Funny enough, that’s more or less what we’re doing now,” Apte, the co-founder of Clockwork, says over the phone. The development of a robot that could paint your manicure wasn’t only imagined out of necessity; artificial intelligence was advancing at a breakneck speed—Apte and her co-founders wanted to see how they could push the envelope themselves. “Robots are going to start interacting with humans more and more,” she says. “We wanted to have a voice there.”
What Is Clockwork—And How Does It Work?
Clockwork’s target audience is the person who is juggling a million plates and they don’t have time to do their nails on a regular basis. “Beauty services shouldn’t be reserved for those who just have the time and money for them,” Apte says.
The Clockwork team wanted to make the manicure process as seamless as possible. First, you drop a nail polish cartridge into the machine. (“It’s kind of similar to placing a pod in an espresso machine,” says Apte.) Then you place your fingers, one at a time, inside the machine. Then the robot works its magic: “The machine basically captures a bunch of pictures of your hand with two 3-D cameras and then it builds a multi-dimensional map of your fingers,” Apte says. “That information is sent to the AI, and the AI determines how the robot should move in order to deposit the polish in the right places.”
To make sure that the algorithm was as diverse as possible when it came to the hand and nail types, sizes, and colors that made up the formula, Clockwork’s team first started by asking family and friends to send pictures of their hands. Then they invited people from Dropbox and Roman (their offices are near Clockwork’s HQ in San Francisco) to try it out. And when they were fundraising, they asked investors to stop by their office and paint their nails, giving them even more data to strengthen their algorithm.
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