Martinez, California is about as far as you can get from Silicon Valley and still be in the San Francisco Bay Area. Perched on the northeastern tip of the bay, the small town is home to Hello Robot, a startup that itself is about as far from the lofty promises of its robotic rivals 45 miles south as you can get.
Hello Robot launched the fourth iteration of its domestic helper robot, Stretch, last month. And you can call it a humanoid robot. While Stretch features a vaguely humanoid torso and head with sensor studs, its telescoping arm has a pair of pincers and moves on a heavy, omnidirectional wheel base.
When Stretch’s batteries die, the lights around its “eyes” glow — “it looks angry,” jokes Blaine Matulevich, a company engineer.
Founded in 2017 by CEO Aaron Edsinger, a former director of robotics at Google, and CTO Charlie Kemp, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Hello Robot isn’t building a foundation model or promising to take on every job a human can do. Hello Robot developed Stretch to do something that many other robots don’t: Work in real homes, with real people, at a time when most are behind glass in laboratories.
This is vital. While the latest advances in artificial intelligence promise more possibilities for robots, there is a dearth of useful training data. And while the simulation is improving, investors are increasingly focused on growth.
“Developer-first companies are accumulating site-specific recovery loops and workflow tolerances that no competitor can buy or synthesize,” Bullhound Capital wrote in a reference for the industry published last week. “In robotics, the moat is not just IP, but accumulated man-hours under real responsibility.”
A different kind of incarnation
Keith Platt, a Georgia investor who now sits on Hello Robot’s board of directors, invested in the company after taking Stretch on as a roommate. Platt became a quadriplegic in 2021, able to control only parts of his shoulders, neck and head. He began exploring adaptive technology and in 2024 began working with Hello Robot, which has an occupational therapist on the team to support its work with Platt and others with similar conditions.
Platt controls his Stretch using a voice-activated iPhone app. can instruct him to move autonomously to a part of his home and then take direct control to handle objects and perform tasks. A deceptively simple task was figuring out how to get Stretch to serve him a protein shake for breakfast, which usually requires the help of another person.
“When we first started with this activity, it took me regardless — no one was there — it took almost two hours,” Platt told TechCrunch. “But I would stick with it. It got to where, within minutes, I could drink the entire shake and put it back on the counter.”
Being dependent on people is a real challenge, both physically and emotionally, Platt says. Anything he can do to regain his independence – like putting on or taking off his reading glasses or brushing his teeth on his own – “is huge”. Not just for him, but for the people who care about him.
He predicts it would be “life-changing” for families if robotic assistants could enable people with mobility challenges to safely spend a day at home, allowing their family members to work independently or leave the house without hiring a professional caregiver.
The Stretch comes from the factory with a limited range. The focus on having a human in the loop is intentional. “Being in control is a feature — it’s desirable to have it built into the robot,” Matulevitch said.
And, Platt points out, he’s not worried about Stretch falling over if it crashes.
The material is hard
Despite the money flowing into startups designing brains for robots, their bodies still leave a lot to be desired. While components are getting cheaper, the latest technology still offers heavy members that require high energy active balancing. A robotic hand and arm weighs much more than a human one, and physics is unforgiving.
When robots make mistakes, they damage things around them. A startup, the Bot Company, is being sued from an Airbnb owner in San Francisco who says the company rented out his apartment to work on its robot, which scratched furniture, smashed appliances and broke bathroom tiles.
“The state of the hardware today is actually abysmal from a ‘I want to have a robot to be my parent,'” Mahi Shafiullah, a postdoc working on robotic hands at the University of California, Berkeley, told TechCrunch. He recalled industrial robots in his lab accidentally puncturing a plastic kitchen playset they were supposed to handle carefully.
Shafiullah eventually got to use the third generation of Hello Robot’s Stretch as part of his doctoral research at New York University. Models that helped developed with Stretch won the Best Demonstration Award at the Computer Vision And Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference of at least one year.
Hello Robot doesn’t promise that Stretch will have the sophistication or capability of the humanoid robots that grace the valley, but its simpler design could make it more powerful. Edsinger compares his company to Waymo, which became the leading supplier of self-driving cars by focusing on safety first (though money helped).
A leader in this field, 1X, gained considerable attention last year when it unveiled a humanoid robot, Neo, that people could buy to perform chores around the house. The company says it has sold out of the 10,000 Neos it plans to build this year, but none have been delivered so far.
“Hello Robot was very thoughtful and really cared about this problem, because I think they’re designing it to be around people first,” Shafiullah said. “And then they think, where are the possibilities that can fit within those constraints?”
Homebound
The Stretch 4 costs an affordable $30,000 for a robot, which is a bit more than robots from Chinese manufacturers, although Edsinger notes that these often don’t come with sensors or software, extras that ultimately drive up the price. He expects to build between 200 and 300 at the company’s Martinez headquarters, with the first run already sold out.
Edsinger wants to keep the robot accessible to hackers and researchers with low budgets. A design criterion for Stretch is that it must be able to be shipped in a cardboard box via UPS or DHL—once wooden boxes and installation teams are required, costs increase and accessibility decreases.
Hello Robot customers include researchers using Stretch to test increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence brains, enterprise customers testing Stretch’s usefulness in settings such as data centers, and people working to develop home aids for people with disabilities.
The combination of the robot’s comprehensive array of sensors, physical capabilities and safe functions could make it a candidate to fulfill the hopes of natural AI believers.
“The algorithms may be there, but the data isn’t, and the data is really like the 80% component that matters,” Shafiullah said.
Having a robot that can safely collect this data is another step forward. And Hello Robot intends to keep repeating. Lessons from Stretch 4’s launch promise to inform the company’s next bot, which could lower the price and increase the capabilities enough to realize a vision of robot-human collaboration in the home.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
