Dream Labs raises $90 million seed funding to ‘build the brain for everyday robots’

What happened

Dream Labs, an AI company building the brain for everyday robots, has announced $90 million in seed funding led by B Capital along with Kindred Ventures, with participation from A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC, and Adrian Aoun, among others. Alongside the financing, the company launched Dream API (the interface one piece of software uses to talk to another), the first publicly available API that turns a robot’s camera feed and a plain-English instruction into motor commands, even for robots it has never seen before.

Factories worldwide run a record 5 million industrial robots, yet nearly every one is programmed for a single task, and what it learns can’t transfer to another machine. Low-cost robots now sell for a few thousand dollars but ship with no built-in intelligence.

Teaching one robot one task can take specialists months, and a new task or new hardware often means starting from zero. Dream Labs’ flagship model, Dream-1, works across robots from different manufacturers.

Trained on video of people performing everyday tasks, it predicts what will happen next and determines the robot’s resulting action. Because it learns from video rather than from a single machine, its capabilities transfer across hardware. Out of the box, Dream-1 can control any robot with grippers, zero-shot.