Dream Labs, a San Francisco company building AI software to control everyday robots, has raised $90m in a seed round. It announced the funding on 19 October 2026 together with the public launch of its API.
B Capital and Kindred Ventures led the round. A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC and the angel investor Adrian Aoun also took part. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Dream Labs was founded in 2026 by former NVIDIA researchers, including people who led the chipmaker's GR00T robotics research and worked on its DreamZero and World Action Models projects. Joel Jang is co-founder and chief executive; the announcement did not name the other founders.
“The hardware is ready. What's been missing is a brain any robot can use.”Joel Jang, Co-founder and CEO, Dream Labs
What Dream Labs does
The company's main product is Dream-1, a robot foundation model. Instead of relying only on data recorded from robots, it is trained on video of people carrying out everyday tasks. The model predicts what should happen next in a scene and then works out the action a robot needs to take to make it happen.
Developers reach the model through the Dream API, which takes a camera feed and an instruction in plain English and returns robot actions. The company said Dream-1 can control a two-armed robot with parallel grippers without any extra training data, and currently handles tabletop tasks such as picking up and placing objects and folding laundry. Support for wheeled mobile robots and robots with dexterous hands is planned.
For hardware the model does not yet support, a Fine-tuning as a Service product lets customers send a small set of demonstrations and receive an adapted model within hours. A browser-based Robot Playground lets anyone send commands to a robot in the company's San Francisco office and watch it respond live.
"When you get into a rental car, you don't relearn how to drive," Jang said, comparing that to how Dream-1 approaches a new robot.
Cheaper robots, and the limits so far
Dream Labs said it works with more than 20 hardware partners and tunes the model for each of their robots, which cost roughly $2,000 to $10,000. MakerMods, which sells two-armed robot arms for $2,000, was quoted in the announcement; its chief executive, Ryan Chan, said that the hardest part for his customers has been getting the robots to do actual work.
Daisy Cai, a general partner at B Capital, said a capable robot arm now costs about as much as a high-end laptop rather than a luxury car, and that what such robots need now is intelligence.
SiliconANGLE and Unite.AI both reported that access to the full Dream-1 model costs $3 an hour; they gave different prices for a lighter version. Unite.AI, citing the company's research page, reported that Dream-1 is a research beta that has not been validated for safety-critical use, that its zero-shot ability is limited to two-armed robots with parallel grippers, and that performance varied widely across 27 robot designs it was tested on in simulation.
What the money is for
Dream Labs said it will spend the money mainly on computing power, to widen the range of tasks and robots Dream-1 can handle and to serve more users.
The company has not disclosed its headcount, revenue or customer numbers, and no earlier funding round has been reported in the sources reviewed.
Company website: dreamlabs.ai