On the 32nd floor of a downtown Toronto office building, a group of about 50 people—some in suits, others in vests and gingham shirts—eat a catered buffet lunch and size up a robotic head.

The head is bald, but otherwise has the features of a conventionally attractive woman. She swivels back and forth, a faint squeak audible when her blue eyes blink. When she speaks, she reveals a Scottish accent.

“My name is Aria. I’m a prototype of the mobile platform robotic interactor. I can entertain, inform and assist in a great number of situations,” she says, once prompted by Matt McMullen, her creator and operator. After McMullen asks a few test questions—what’s your favourite colour, what’s your favourite pastime, what can you tell me about quantum physics—he turns to the audience. Is there anything they want to ask Aria?

“Is the stock going up or down?” someone blurts out.

This, of course, is the question on everyone’s mind. The group is composed of investors and other people connected to Realbotix, formerly known as Tokens.com—a Toronto-based company that made an extreme pivot from crypto to humanoid robots after acquiring McMullen’s Las Vegas-based firm Simulacra in April in a $16.7-million all-stock deal. 

Simulacra, in turn, was undergoing a pivot of its own, attempting to leverage its position as a creator of realistic sex dolls to break into the AI-enabled robot business.

Simulacra’s RealDolls have received extensive media coverage and are featured in the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl, in which Ryan Gosling plays an excruciatingly shy young man who takes a RealDoll with him everywhere, insisting she’s a real woman named Bianca. 

McMullen launched the business in 1997, teaching himself the skills necessary to make poseable lifelike figures following a job at a Halloween company, where he learned to make monster masks. RealDolls, and the realistic skin technology Simulacra developed to make them, have historically generated US$2 million to US$4 million in annual revenue for the company. But the market for realistic sex dolls is a niche one, and McMullen grew bored.

“It was no longer creatively rewarding for me. I felt like I had more to say as an artist,” McMullen said. Simulacra launched robots that could talk and move in 2016.

Robots are even more capital-intensive than realistic life-sized dolls, however, and McMullen needed funding. He closed a seed round in 2020 and a Series A in 2023, both of which included investments from controversial crypto billionaire Arthur Hayes, who in 2022 pleaded guilty to failing to establish an anti-money-laundering program as CEO of Seychelles-based crypto-trading platform Bitmex.

Now part of the combined company Realbotix, the company still sells RealDolls, as well as a robot sex doll called RealDollX, which launched in 2018. It also offers an AI-based companion app that will talk dirty to you, for a subscription fee.

The app lets users design a personality for the chatbot—choosing traits like aggressive, shy, flirty or passive—and create a digital avatar to go with it. The app is “unfiltered,” as Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel puts it, but can also be used to create a platonic companion. You don’t need to buy the robot to use the app, but if you do, the AI personality you design in the app can inhabit the robot’s form. 

The company’s executives hope to market the realistic skin technology for use in prosthetics. The real growth opportunity they see, however, is in expanding their AI and robot business beyond the adult world—selling them to amusement parks, or to companies looking for an attention-getting display for their trade show booths, or to hospitals full of people in need of companionship. 

Meanwhile, in Canada, the company that would ultimately purchase Simulacra was exploring a very different cutting-edge business model. Tokens.com made international news in 2021 for purchasing virtual land in metaverse platform Decentraland for a record US$2.4 million worth of crypto.

At the time, crypto and the metaverse were white hot. McKinsey predicted the metaverse could create US$5 trillion in value by 2030. Owning valuable digital land in the most popular metaverse virtual worlds was a way for Tokens.com to stake a claim on that predicted future value.

Things didn’t work out the way the company had hoped. The metaverse and crypto both crashed spectacularly in 2022. Decentraland, the virtual world where Tokens.com made its blockbuster land purchase, became a ghost town.

Tokens.com laid off 40 per cent of its staff and launched a strategic review in November 2023, saying in a release management was “disappointed” in the performance of its metaverse subsidiary. In March 2024, the company closed the sale of its metaverse and crypto gaming subsidiaries to New York City-based StoryFire.

But Tokens.com still held a significant amount of crypto on its balance sheet, and the market was starting to recover. By the end of February 2024, its inventory of digital assets was worth about $21 million.

Tekin Salimi, a former corporate lawyer in Toronto and an investor in both Simulacra and Tokens.com, put the heads of the two companies in touch. On April 5, Tokens.com announced its acquisition of Simulacra, with Kiguel staying on as CEO and McMullen becoming president.

Because Tokens.com was publicly traded, the deal grants Realbotix, the combined company, access to retail investors in addition to Tokens.com’s crypto treasury. Realbotix trades on the TSX Venture Exchange, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the U.S. OTCQB. “If you can get this into the hands of U.S. retail, that’s who’s gonna love this story and get it out,” Kiguel says at the downtown Toronto investor lunch.

Kiguel would prefer not to lean on the company’s salacious origins to pique interest, however. Despite the fact they generate the bulk of the company’s revenues, Kiguel spends little time in the investor presentation on RealDolls, euphemistically calling them “the humanoid figures.” 

“I don’t want to make this about, you know, other sexual things in the past,” Kiguel says in an interview. “The future of this business is in the robotics and the AI.”

That’s not to say Kiguel is above an attention-grabbing stunt or two. He says he’s working on getting the company’s robots on daytime talk shows, featured on popular podcasts and opening the markets on financial television.

Kiguel says he even applied to put Aria, the robot head featured at the investor lunch, on the Realbotix board (which also includes ClearCo co-founder Andrew D’Souza). The TSX Venture Exchange turned him down, he says, citing its rule that directors must be at least 18 years of age. (Catherine Kee, a spokesperson for the exchange’s owner TMX Group, would neither confirm nor deny this.)

Realbotix has challenges beyond marketing and publicity. Its competitors in the race to build humanoid robots include Boston Dynamics, which Hyundai Motor Group purchased in 2021 at a US$1.1-billion valuation, and Elon Musk’s Tesla. Realbotix’s case for why it stands a chance among the competition is that its robots look like people, not Stormtroopers, and are designed to form relationships, not “lift the box from one end of the warehouse to the other,” as Kiguel puts it.

Bill Ray, who covers robots at the tech research and consulting firm Gartner, said Realbotix’s real competition might not be other humanoid robots at all. The Paro robotic seal, Hasbro’s robot dogs and cats, and Enchanted Tools’ elven Mirokaï are all examples of robots working in the therapeutic and medical markets Realbotix hopes to break into.

“The uncanny valley is the thing here,” said Ray, referring to the eerie feeling people experience when faced with something that looks almost, but not quite, like a human. “You make a dog, or a pet, or a cute little robot, or a cute little space alien. People can build relationships with those things. The question is, why are you making it a human?”

If anyone has a shot at it, Realbotix is a good candidate, Ray said. “Touch is really hard. And that scenario, obviously, that’s where they have their skills. There’s some experience there.”

At the Realbotix investor lunch, attendees pass around a model human ear and hairless cat’s head made with the company’s realistic skin technology. The skin folds are convincing, but the texture is squishier and bouncier than the real thing.

The company’s investors seem largely positive about the pivot to robotics, but have questions. They ask how the company will safeguard sensitive data. (Military-grade encryption, among other protections, says McMullen.) There’s a question about why they’re only being shown the robot’s head and not the full-body version. (It’s much easier to get the head across the border, Kiguel says.)

Aria’s answer to the day’s most crucial question—is the stock price going up or down—is cryptic, and grammatically a bit off. “It would be nice if our stock price going up or down from here,” she says, to laughs. 

Aria can’t predict stock prices, and she can’t yet sit on a corporate board. But she’s fighting the same fight as generations of women before her: to be taken seriously in the workplace, not just to be seen as a sex object.

No one asks for her views on that. Her head swivels. She blinks. She says nothing.