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Feather Robotics Raises $7.6M Pre-Seed to Build the Android of Robotics
Gradient Ventures leads the round for a $30,000 modular humanoid already cooking in restaurants and cleaning labs.
Feather Robotics has raised $7.6 million in pre-seed funding led by Gradient Ventures to build a modular humanoid robot that other companies can develop on top of.
The company was founded by Hoa Mai, who previously started a humanoid robotics company that sold to 1X in 2025, and Parsa Bakhtiari, a former Tesla engineer who worked on the Model 3.
The Android of Robotics
Feather's pitch borrows from smartphones. Rather than build a closed robot and the applications that run on it, the company sells hardware that developers and businesses can customize, including arm lengths adjusted for different jobs.
The robots work with AI models from Nvidia, Skild and Physical Intelligence, so buyers are not locked into one vendor's software stack.
"You can't buy a Tesla robot today and develop on top of it," Mai said. "We realized that this is not how most companies became successful."
Selling Now, Not Later
Feather robots cost $30,000 each and are already deployed doing work: cooking in restaurants and cleaning science labs. The company says it has passed $1 million in revenue and has spent only a fraction of its pre-seed round, with a larger product launch in preparation.
That is unusual in humanoid robotics, where most companies are still running pilots and burning through far larger rounds before shipping anything.
The Investor Case
Gradient Ventures' Darian Shirazi framed the economics in labor terms: "You would hire a laborer for $50,000 to $60,000 a year, you'd have to train them... You can now buy a Feather robot to do that."
TechCrunch first reported the round and the company's developer-platform strategy.
Why It Matters
Humanoid robotics has drawn enormous funding on the promise of general-purpose labor, and most of that money has gone to vertically integrated companies building both robot and brain.
Feather is betting the market splits the way computing did, with hardware makers, model providers and application builders as separate layers. At $30,000 a unit with revenue already coming in, the company will find out quickly whether developers want to build on someone else's body.
Source
TechCrunch — "Meet Feather, the startup building the ‘Android of robotics’ for developers"