imitation-learning
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Sensei Robotics
Sensei Robotics (YC S24) is a San Francisco startup building the data layer for robot learning. It pairs a sub-$300 sensorized exoskeleton arm with a distributed network of trained human operators - 'Senseis' - who perform real-world manipulation demonstrations on demand. Robotics and AI teams submit a task like folding cloth or loading a dishwasher, and Sensei returns curated, labeled human-demonstration data. The company positions itself as 'the Scale AI for robotics training data,' claiming roughly a tenth of the cost and twice the speed of conventional teleoperation setups.
Anvil Robotics
Anvil Robotics is a Palo Alto-based hardware and software company building a composable platform for Physical AI. It sells ready-to-run robot devkits - most notably the open-source OpenARM bimanual manipulator and the OpenYAM arm - bundled with teleoperation, data-collection, and training tooling so teams can train end-to-end robot policies on day one instead of spending six months sourcing and wiring parts. Backed by a $6.5M seed round, Anvil manufactures in-house in Taiwan and has shipped hundreds of robots to customers including Nvidia, Google, and university labs.
Mike Xia
Mike Xia is the founder and CEO of Anvil Robotics, a San Francisco startup building open-source, composable robot devkits for the Physical AI era. After scaling an AI camera company to $5M ARR and helping grow cloud-compute platform Voltage Park to hundreds of millions in revenue, he teamed up with CTO Vijay Pradeep - whom he met as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Matter Venture Partners - to attack a problem they heard from 50+ teams: it took months and up to six figures just to assemble a robot before any AI training could begin. Anvil sells ready-to-go OpenARM and OpenYAM kits manufactured in Taiwan, has shipped 100+ robots to customers like NVIDIA, Figure AI, Path Robotics, Google, Stanford and CMU, and raised a $6.5M seed led by Matter Venture Partners and Humba Ventures.
Sunday
Sunday is a Mountain View robotics company building Memo, a wheeled home robot that learns chores like loading the dishwasher, folding laundry and pulling espresso shots. Founded by Stanford PhD roboticists Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, Sunday emerged from stealth in late 2025 and reached a $1.15B valuation in March 2026 after a $165M Series B led by Coatue.
Tony Zhao
Tony Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday, a Mountain View-based robotics company building Memo - a home robot trained on 10 million episodes of real household routines. A Stanford PhD dropout and UC Berkeley EECS alum, Zhao invented ALOHA and ACT during his doctoral research, open-source frameworks that became foundational to modern robot manipulation. Sunday reached unicorn status in March 2026 with a $165M Series B led by Coatue, putting the company at a $1.15B valuation with a mission to put a helpful robot in every home.
Thomas Tang
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.