Robots can be programmed to do various tasks, such as packing boxes and even performing surgery. But each individual movement or task requires its own specific training process, which makes it difficult for robots to adapt to real-world scenarios.
Mbodi wants to make training robots easier and faster with the help of AI agents. The company will showcase this technology as one of the Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
New York-based Mbodi has built a cloud-to-edge system, a hybrid computing system that uses both cloud and local computing, designed to integrate with existing robotic technology stacks. The software relies on a multitude of AI agents communicating with each other to gather the necessary information to help a robot learn a task faster.
Once deployed, Mbodi will collect data and learn from its real use cases.
Xavier Chi, co-founder of Mbodi, told TechCrunch that users prompt the software using natural language, and Mbodi breaks down the request into smaller subtasks. Mbodi’s cluster of agents essentially divides and conquers the task of gathering the necessary information to train the bot to prompt quickly.
“The hard thing about the natural world is the infinite possibilities,” Chi said. “Any time you can invent something completely new, you don’t have data, that’s a problem in the physical world. We always need a system where you can orchestrate different models or have someone debug a robot and tell it to do certain things a certain way.”
Chi said he and co-founder Sebastian Peralta got the idea for the company while working as engineers at Google. While not working in robotics, both realized that advances in artificial intelligence were headed for the physical world, and despite the rise of natural artificial intelligence, there still wasn’t a good way to train robots quickly.
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Many companies, such as Skild AI and FieldAI, are trying to help train robots faster by building large AI models of the world with enough real-world data to make it easier for them to adapt to new environments. Chi said that philosophy just doesn’t work with how constantly the world is changing.
Mbodi launched in 2024 with a focus on selection and packaging. The company won an ABB Robotics AI startup competition last year, which landed them a partnership with the Swiss robotics organization that was acquired by SoftBank for $5.4 billion in October.
Now the company is working with a Fortune 100 company in the consumer goods and products space to prove the concept.
“For the CPG customer, they have a lot of people, they’re packing different brand products on a tray or a shelf, the problem is that it changes every day,” Chi said. “Because of that, it’s impossible to put robots there. Reprogramming those robots, it’s just not possible, there’s still a lot of people doing that work.”
Mbodi hopes to start further developing its software in 2026.
“We want to build something that works, that can actually be developed,” Chi said. “We’re not a research lab, we don’t want to be a research lab in that sense. We want to put something into production that works reliably.”
If you want to hear Mbodi firsthand and see dozens of additional presentations, attend valuable workshops and make the connections that drive business results, head here to learn more about this year’s Disruptheld from October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.
This track has been updated to better reflect Chi’s title.
