Is Silicon Valley ready to put robots in people’s homes? Hello robot.

Martinez, California, is about as far away as you can get from Silicon Valley, and still in the San Francisco Bay Area. Located on the northeastern edge of the bay, this small city is home to Hello Robot, a startup that is a far cry from the extreme promises of its robotics competitors 45 miles south.

Hello Robot released the fourth version of its home assistance robot, Stretch, last month. It may be called a humanoid robot. While Stretch features a vaguely human torso and sensor-studded head, his telescopic arm has a pair of pincers, and he rides around on a heavy, multi-directional wheelbase.

When Stretch’s batteries run out, lights glow around his “eyes” — “he looks angry,” jokes Blaine Matulevich, an engineer with the company.

Hello Robot, founded in 2017 by CEO Aaron Edsinger, a former director of robotics at Google, and CTO Charlie Kemp, a professor at Georgia Tech, doesn’t build a basic model or promise to take on every job a human can do. Hello Robot developed Stretch to do something that not many other robots do: work in real homes, with real people, at a time when most of them are behind glass in labs.

This is vital. While the latest advances in artificial intelligence promise more capabilities for robots, there is a dearth of useful training data. As simulation improves, investors are increasingly focusing on deployment.

“Companies that deploy first accumulate site-specific recovery loops and workflow tolerances that no competitor can afford or manufacture,” Bullhound Capital wrote in a sector report published last week. “In robotics, the moat is not just the intellectual property, but the man-hours accumulated under real-world responsibility.”

A different kind of embodiment

Keith Platt, a Georgia investor who is now on Hello Robot’s board, invested in the company after taking over Stretch as a housemate. Platt became a quadriplegic in 2021, and was only able to control 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 team to support its work with Platt and other people with similar conditions.

Platt controls his Stretch using a voice-activated iPhone app. He can assign him to move independently to a place in his home, and then take direct control of handling objects and carrying out tasks. One deceptively simple project was figuring out how to get Stretch to serve him a protein shake for breakfast, which usually required someone else’s help.

“When we first started this activity, it took me autonomously — no one was there — about two hours,” Platt told TechCrunch. “But I was going to stick with it. It got to the point where, within a few minutes, I could drink the entire shake and put it back on the counter.”

Relying on people is a real challenge, both physically and emotionally, Platt says. Anything he can do to regain his independence — like putting his reading glasses on or taking them off, or brushing his own teeth — “is huge.” Not just for himself, but for the people who care about him.

He expects that “families’ lives will change” if robotic assistants enable people with mobility challenges to spend a day safely at home, allowing their family members to work independently or leave the house without the help of a professional caregiver.

Stretching comes from the factory with limited autonomy; The focus on having a human being in the loop is intentional. “The ability to control is an advantage, and it is desirable to have it embodied in the robot,” Matuljevic said.

Platt points out that he doesn’t worry about Stretch falling apart if it makes a mistake.

Hardware is tough

Despite all the money flowing into startups designing robot brains, their bodies still leave a lot to be desired. While components are becoming cheaper, the latest technology still provides heavy limbs that require high power and active balance. A robotic hand and arm weigh much more than a human, and the physics are unforgiving.

When robots make mistakes, they damage things around them. One startup, Bot Company, is being sued by an Airbnb owner in San Francisco, who says the company rented his apartment to work on its robot, which scratched furniture, broke appliances, and broke bathroom tiles.

“The state of hardware today is very poor from the perspective of, ‘I want to have robots in my parents’ place,’” Mahi Shafiullah, a postdoctoral researcher working on robotic hands at the University of California, Berkeley, told TechCrunch. He recalls that industrial robots in his lab accidentally hacked into a set of plastic kitchen toys they were supposed to carefully manipulate.

Shafiullah eventually used the third generation of Hello Robot’s Stretch as part of his doctoral research at New York University. The models he helped develop with Stretch won the Best Demo award at at least this year’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference.

Hello Robot doesn’t promise that Stretch will have the complexity or power of the valley-loving humanoid robots, but its simpler design could make it more powerful. Edsinger compares his company to Waymo, which became the leading provider of self-driving cars by focusing on safety first (although money helped).

One of the leading companies in this field, 1X, was the subject of much attention last year when it unveiled a humanoid robot, Neo, that people can buy to perform chores in their homes. The company says it has sold 10,000 Neos that it plans to manufacture this year, but so far, none have actually been delivered.

“Hello Robot has been very careful and really concerned about this issue, because I think they designed it to be about people first,” Shafiullah said. “Then they think, where are the capabilities that they can fit within these constraints?”

Heading towards home

The Stretch 4 costs a reasonable $30,000 a robot, which is a little more than robots from Chinese manufacturers, though Edsinger points out that these devices often don’t come with built-in sensors or software, extras that end up driving up the price. It is expected that between 200 and 300 cars will be manufactured at the company’s headquarters in Martinez, with the first batch already sold.

Edsinger wants to keep the bot accessible to hackers and researchers with low budgets. One of Stretch’s design criteria is that it must be shippable in a cardboard box via UPS or DHL – once wooden crates and installation teams are needed, costs rise and accessibility decreases.

Hello Robot’s customers include researchers using Stretch to test increasingly sophisticated AI brains, enterprise customers testing Stretch’s utility in settings such as data centers, and people working to develop home assistants for people with disabilities.

The robot’s combination of comprehensive sensor suite, physical capabilities, and safe operations could make it a candidate to fulfill the hopes of believers in physical AI.

“The algorithms may be there, but the data is not, and the data is actually 80% of the important component,” Shafiullah said.

Having a robot that can safely collect that data is another step forward. And Hello Robot intends to keep iterating. Lessons learned from the Stretch 4 launch promise to fuel the company’s next robot, potentially lowering the price and increasing capabilities enough to realize a vision of human-robot collaboration in the home.