Dream Labs Raises $90M Seed to Give Any Robot a Brain

Posted on in Entrepreneurship

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Seed rounds used to pay for a few laptops and a modest office. Dream Labs has raised $90 million at that stage, and it plans to spend it on giving robots a brain. The round was co-led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures, with A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, Wing VC, SV Angel, Scribble VC and angel investor Adrian Aoun also taking part.

Learning from people doing chores

The company's main product is Dream-1, which it calls a “universal brain” for robots. The model learns from first-person video of people doing everyday work, such as stacking shelves or packing boxes. It predicts the next physical step and then works out which robot action will get there. It runs on any two-armed robot with parallel grippers and needs only a video feed and instructions in plain language. It can already handle pick-and-place and clothes folding, which puts it ahead of many humans on laundry day. “The hardware is ready, but what's been missing is a brain any robot can use,” said co-founder and CEO Joel Jang. Daisy Cai of B Capital noted that the team did some of the defining work in robot learning at Nvidia.

Robot brains by the hour

Alongside the funding, Dream Labs launched a public API, a browser demo called Robot Playground and a fine-tuning service: customers send demonstration videos and receive a customized model within a few hours. The most powerful version of Dream-1 costs $3 per hour, and a lightweight version costs 75 cents per hour.

  • More than 20 robot hardware makers already work with the startup.
  • Their machines cost between $2,000 and $10,000.
  • The company estimates that more than 5 million industrial robots operate worldwide.

Next, Dream Labs wants to extend the model to wheeled mobile robots and to robots with fully dexterous, humanlike hands, using the new money to pay for the compute.

Source: Dream Labs Raises $90M Seed to Build the Brain for Everyday Robots