Feather's $29,990 Robot Body Draws $7.6M SAFE Led by Gradient Ventures

Feather, an East Palo Alto robotics company founded in 2025, has raised $7.6M in pre-seed financing to scale a modular robot platform built for companies developing physical-AI applications. Gradient Ventures led the SAFE round, with Builder Capital, Geometry, SEED Innovations and Virgo VC participating. The company announced the financing on September 24, 2026.

Feather is selling a configurable robot body and an open software development kit rather than asking every application developer to build the same hardware stack again. Its current system is a 105 kg bimanual mobile robot with two 7-degree-of-freedom arms, a torso that travels 600 mm vertically, and a holonomic base that can move in any direction without turning. The base system carries a limited-time starting price of $29,990 and supports configurable Nvidia Jetson compute, stereo cameras, grippers or 6-degree-of-freedom hands, built-in teleoperation, and an open Python and ROS2 SDK. Dual hot-swappable batteries support a claimed 10-hour operating window, and the company's published support model includes U.S.-based engineers, a 1-year warranty, service coverage, fleet agreements and stocked replacement parts.

The company was founded by CEO Hoa Mai, who has worked on embodied-AI systems and humanoid robotics, and CPO Parsa Bakhtiari, who worked on Tesla Model 3 production and advanced robotics projects. Their operating thesis is that physical-AI developers should be able to buy a capable body, configure it, and spend their engineering time on the application that makes the machine valuable.

Feather says it built its first prototype in two months, fulfilled its first order in nine months, and has surpassed $1M in revenue. It also says its robots have worked for more than a year across manufacturing, food service and laboratory settings, including for an unnamed manufacturer with $4B in annual revenue. Those figures are company-reported and the customers remain undisclosed. TechCrunch reported the machines are performing tasks such as restaurant cooking and laboratory cleaning while Feather prepares for a larger product launch.

On valuation, SEED Innovations' disclosure describes the financing as a Simple Agreement for Future Equity and says SEED's $1M participation will convert at a future qualifying round or liquidity event subject to a $60M valuation cap. That cap applies to SEED's conversion terms and should not be read as a priced valuation for Feather.

The financing gives Feather more room to expand production, engineering, field support and go-to-market capacity. The company is hiring across engineering, operations and commercial roles, though it has not published a detailed allocation for the proceeds.

The round lands in a category drawing heavy capital. DevCuration's funding database tracked two Physical AI and Robotics Infrastructure rounds totaling $197M in disclosed capital over the past 30 days, including Antioch's $32M Series A for physical-AI simulation and Lyte's $165M Series C for physical-AI perception. Many of the best-funded companies in the space want to own the intelligence, body and application together; Feather is making a different bet, that a broad developer ecosystem will need accessible hardware even if the winning physical-AI models come from several providers.