Sureform is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator X25) that collects real-world, multimodal human data to train robots and world models. It equips workers at hotels, warehouses, restaurants, construction sites, and laundromats with head-mounted cameras, stereo depth rigs, and handheld grippers that capture time-synced video, audio, pose, depth, and tactile data while they do their jobs. Each session is delivered to robotics teams as structured, synchronized, training-ready data.
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.
Dexmate is a Santa Clara robotics startup building Vega, a general-purpose mobile robot with high-payload arms, dexterous hands and a foldable torso that reaches over seven feet. Founded in 2024 by a team out of MIT, UCSD and CMU, the company pairs custom hardware with a data-driven 'flywheel' learning approach - combining simulation and real-world data - to tackle dexterous manipulation for logistics, manufacturing, retail and research. Backed by NVIDIA and LG Technology Ventures, Dexmate has opened preorders for Vega at $89,999.
Earth Force Technologies is a San Francisco climate-tech company modernizing wildfire prevention. It builds precision-forestry sensors, in-cabin tablets, and a web portal that give crews real-time, tree-level guidance during fuel-treatment work and let administrators oversee far more acres from a desk. By combining teleoperated machinery, jobsite connectivity, and automated reporting, the company aims to make landscape-scale forest treatments faster, safer, and cheaper - so states, federal agencies, and conservation districts can reduce catastrophic fire risk at the pace the crisis demands.
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.
Tutor Intelligence builds AI-powered collaborative robots that pick, pack, and palletize alongside people on factory and warehouse floors. Born out of MIT's CSAIL, the company sells robots by the hour - a Robots-as-a-Service model that drops a working robot onto a line in days, not months, with no programming required. Its flagship Cassie handles infinite SKUs at up to 14 cases per minute, while Data Factory 1, a 100-robot facility in a renovated Watertown mill, trains the next generation of factory-ready robot AI on real-world data.