Feather Robotics Sells $30,000 Modular Humanoid as It Builds an 'Android of Robotics' for Developers

The company was started in 2025 by Mai, who sold a previous humanoid startup to 1X, and Parsa Bakhtiari, a former Tesla Model 3 engineer who at one point reported directly to Elon Musk. Gradient Ventures backed Feather at its inception and led the $7.6 million pre-seed round the startup previously announced.

Unlike Tesla and Figure, which are developing both a robot body and a foundational AI "brain" that is not yet widely deployed, Feather supplies hardware and a software toolkit that developers can use for real-world tasks today. Its system is modular, allowing buyers to customize the hardware for different uses, such as changing arm lengths. On the software side, the robot can run models from any leading robotics AI provider, including Generalist, Skild and Physical Intelligence.

"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. Hardware players like Nvidia or Apple started with a product that worked and was deployable, and then they added complexity over time."

Feather has not disclosed its customers but said its robots are working as cooks in restaurants in Japan and cleaning science labs. "We've been selling small quantities of these robots, and now that we resolved like almost all the issues over the last year of field testing, we're getting ready for a big product launch," Mai said.

Darian Shirazi, a general partner at Gradient, said Feather has no direct competitors in the United States. He divides the hardware robotics field into three groups: startups such as Sunday building domestic household robots, heavyweights such as Figure and Tesla aiming at general-purpose machines, and Feather, which he said is the only U.S. startup developing a modular humanoid platform.

Mai acknowledged that Feather took a page from Chinese robotics companies such as Unitree. With new foreign-made models restricted from entering the U.S. market, the startup is positioned as a homegrown alternative. Its price is roughly half that of Unitree's H2 Edu, according to the company.

Shirazi argued the market at that price could be large. "You would hire a laborer for $50,000 to $60,000 a year, you'd have to train [them]. They'd have to have HR. They'd have to have all these different support mechanisms," he said. "You can now buy a Feather robot to do that." Shirazi added that Feather has spent only a fraction of its pre-seed funding.

The startup's central bet is that the value in robotics will come from an ecosystem built around the hardware. "If we think about the market size today for physical AI companies, it's very small," Mai said. "But if you think about how many physical AI application companies will probably exist in five years, we expect it to be in the thousands." Feather hopes to be the platform that powers them.