Investee Company Update: Feather Robotics Inc.
Summary by AI BETAClose X
Reach – non-regulatory announcement
25 September 2026
SEED Innovations Limited
("SEED" or the "Company")
Investee Company Update: Feather Robotics Inc.
SEED Innovations Limited (AIM: SEED), the investing company focused on early-stage physical AI and robotics, notes an announcement released by its portfolio company, Feather Robotics Inc. (“Feather”), confirming the completion of a $7.6 million pre-seed funding round in the form of a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (“SAFE”).
The round was led by Gradient Ventures (www.gradient.com), with participation from Builder Capital (www.buildercapital.io), Geometry (www.geometry.xyz), SEED Innovations and Virgo VC (www.virgovc.com). SEED's $1.0 million investment, announced in May 2026, will convert into equity at the next qualifying funding round or liquidity event, subject to a valuation cap of $60 million.
Feather's funding round was featured in an article published by TechCrunch on 24 September 2026, which can be viewed here:
Feather's full announcement is reproduced below:
Feather Raises $7.6M Pre-seed Round to Challenge Tesla, Figure by Building the Best Humanoid Platform for Third-Party Developers
EAST PALO ALTO, California - September 24, 2026 - 10:00 a.m. PT - FEATHER ROBOTICS INC. (“FEATHER”), a platform for humanoid robots aiming to build an ecosystem akin to Apple’s and Nvidia’s, today announced $7.6 million in pre-seed funding led by Gradient with participation from Builder Capital, Geometry, SEED Innovations, and Virgo VC. The company has moved through the hardware lifecycle at lightspeed -- building its first prototype in two months, fulfilling its first order in nine months (vs. 31 months for Figure), and crossing seven figures in revenue while serving customers including a $4 billion revenue manufacturer.
Most humanoid companies in America today fall into two categories. The first group, which includes most of the industry and giants like Tesla and Figure, is taking a fully vertical approach that makes their system off-limits or too expensive for third-party developers. The second group sells research-based hardware platforms that are lower cost but may lack the reliability needed for real-world deployment.
Feather, an American company founded by ex-Google and Tesla employees Hoa Mai and Parsa Bakhtiari, sits deliberately between the two: it sells humanoid robots designed for deployment at a price point running at one-half to one-third of the price of Chinese counterparts. Compared to systems like Unitree’s H2 Edu (~$68k), Agibot’s G2 (~$135k), and Dexmate’s Vega (~$83k), Feather’s system is available to order online today for $29,990. Feather focuses on meeting and exceeding the reliability requirements needed for deployment, having sold robots to customers in manufacturing, food service, and more for over a year.
The team aims to design at the intersection of simplicity and capability; by simplifying the system as much as possible, Feather reduces compounding errors and points of failure, allowing the startup to build a more reliable system at a fraction of the cost.
Each Feather system is modular from the ground up and ships with an SDK, enabling developers to build applications on top. True to the company’s goal of offering real-world deployment today, Feather’s bimanual design features a wheeled, holonomic base that maximizes stability, energy efficiency, and robustness. Each robot has 10-hour battery life (~3x Unitree’s H2), 1-meter reach (~50% longer than the average human arm), and the carrying capacity of an adult human.
“My background is in building embodied AI systems, and I’m on a mission to solve physical AI. But when I looked for a hardware platform to build on top of, I realized that none of them had the unit economics, reliability, and support logistics that I needed to succeed as an independent developer,” said Hoa Mai, CEO and co-founder of Feather. “That’s why we built Feather -- to give every team, no matter their size, the infrastructure to scale physical AI.”
Underpinning the product is a bet about where value in the robotics industry will accrue: Feather believes the primary value capture will happen in the hardware layer, as opposed to software. The company points to the fact that many of the biggest beneficiaries of technological shifts in history have been hardware companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, and Micron. The team further predicts that the commoditization of frontier LLMs seen today will extend to frontier physical AI / Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models from companies like Gemini Robotics, Skild AI, and Physical Intelligence. Put differently, as software continues to scale, Feather is betting that hardware will be the bottleneck -- and that it will own the infrastructure needed to scale hardware to millions of units.
“Physical AI is having its moment, and the cost of operating automated robots is declining by the day. The challenge facing developers is how to integrate the best AI models with the cheapest and most reliable hardware components,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient. “The winners in the physical AI era will provide a seamless platform that combines hardware and software, allowing developers across industries to focus on outcomes rather than the details of the underlying technology. Hoa, Parsa, and the team at Feather are the best we’ve seen at building a cost-effective humanoid platform for developers globally.”
CEO and co-founder Hoa Mai is a serial entrepreneur whose previous company, Kind Humanoid, was acquired by 1X. His co-founder and Feather’s Chief Product Officer, Parsa Bakhtiari, scaled Tesla's Model 3 production and reported to Elon Musk during Tesla's 2018 production crisis. The two believe a wave of intelligent automation is coming as physical AI advances. As millions of dollars pour into the space to fund closed tech stacks for enterprise giants, Feather aims to share the fruits of automation and put physical AI within reach of more businesses hoping to deploy it today.
ENDS
For further information on SEED please visit: www.seedinnovations.co or contact:
|
Lance de Jersey |
SEED Innovations Ltd |
E: info@seedinnovations.co
|
|
James Biddle Roland Cornish |
Beaumont Cornish Limited, Nomad |
T: +44 (0)20 7628 3396
|
|
Isabella Pierre Damon Heath |
Shard Capital Partners LLP Broker |
T: +44 (0)20 4530 6928 |
|
Ana Ribeiro Isabel de Salis
|
St Brides Partners Ltd, Financial PR |
E: seed@stbridespartners.co.uk |
NOTES
SEED Innovations Ltd – https://www.seedinnovations.co
SEED Innovations Ltd (AIM: SEED) is an investing company focused on providing access to high-growth robotics and AI ventures typically beyond the reach of everyday investors. The Company also oversees a legacy portfolio in wellness and life sciences, with a medium-term strategy to unlock its full value.
Feather Robotics Inc. www.feather.dev.
Feather was founded in 2025 by Hoa Mai, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded Kind Humanoid, which was acquired by 1X, and Parsa Bakhtiari, who scaled Tesla's Model 3 production and reported to Elon Musk during Tesla's 2018 production crisis. Feather is building the best hardware and developer platform for humanoid robots; like what the smartphone did for apps, Feather will be the platform for the next generation of companies building human labor applications.
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