Feather Robotics builds an 'Android of robotics' for developers

Feather Robotics, a humanoid startup founded last year, is betting developers — not Tesla or Figure — will build the breakthrough robotics application, whenever it arrives. Unlike Tesla and Figure, which are building both the robot’s body and a foundational “brain” that isn’t yet widely deployed, Feather sells the hardware and software toolkit for developers to tackle real-world tasks now. “You can’t buy a Tesla robot today and develop on top of it,” co-founder Hoa Mai told TechCrunch. “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.”

In 2025, after selling his previous humanoid startup to 1X, Mai teamed up with Parsa Bakhtiari, a former Tesla Model 3 engineer who at one point reported directly to Elon Musk, to build what the two hope will become the “Android of robotics.” Gradient Ventures backed Feather at its inception, leading the startup’s previously announced $7.6 million pre-seed round.

Feather has rolled out a modular robotic system that lets developers customize the hardware for different use cases, such as adjusting arm lengths, and has already begun selling to customers, surpassing $1 million in revenue. The company isn’t disclosing its customers, but says its robots are working as cooks in restaurants in Japan and cleaning up science labs; on the software side, the hardware can run models from any leading robotics AI provider, including Generalist, Skild, or Physical Intelligence.

According to Darian Shirazi, general partner at Gradient, Feather doesn’t have direct competitors in the U.S. He splits the hardware robotics landscape into three categories: startups like Sunday building domestic household robots, heavyweights like Figure and Tesla aiming for general-purpose machines, and Feather, which he believes is the only U.S. startup developing a modular humanoid platform. Mai admits Feather took a page from Chinese robotics companies like Unitree, but with new foreign-made models restricted from entering the U.S. market, Feather is now positioned as a homegrown option of its kind. The robot costs $30,000, about half the price of Unitree’s H2 Edu — a gap Shirazi thinks could unlock a large market, comparing it to the $50,000-to-$60,000 annual cost of hiring and training a human laborer.

Why it matters

Feather’s bet — that an ecosystem of developers building on modular hardware will out-innovate vertically integrated giants — mirrors how Android overtook proprietary mobile platforms; if physical AI follows the same pattern, owning the developer layer could matter more than owning the “brain.”