Syncere, a Palo Alto home-robotics company, raised an $11m pre-seed round led by a16z Speedrun, announced on 3 November 2026. Draper Associates, Physical World, Sequel and SeaX Ventures also invested, along with other backers. No valuation was disclosed.
The company will use the money to speed up deliveries of its LUME robot, expand manufacturing capacity and build out its physical AI platform for new commercial applications, according to Pulse 2.0, which reported the round.
“Home robotics has a deployment problem disguised as a data problem.”Dr. Aaron Tan, Co-Founder and CEO, Syncere
What LUME is
LUME is a floor lamp with a robotic arm and camera built in. It works as an ordinary lamp until it is activated, then it can handle chores such as folding laundry, tidying and making beds, Pulse 2.0 reported. Customers can teach it their preferred way of doing a task, and software updates add capabilities without new hardware. Units that are deployed are meant to send data back that improves future autonomy.
A University of Toronto alumni profile published in January 2026 said the lamp is activated by voice or a smartphone app, extends robotic arms and a camera to fold laundry on nearby surfaces, then returns to lamp form. It said the robot learns through imitation and reinforcement learning, that it stops if it detects a person, animal or obstruction nearby, and that the company plans an app store for future tasks.
LUME starts at $2,699, the company said. It also said LUME has generated millions of dollars in pre-orders and was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2026. The reports did not give a shipping timeline.
The founders and earlier funding
Syncere was founded in 2025 by Dr Aaron Tan, who is chief executive, and Dr Angus Fung, both roboticists who completed their PhDs at the University of Toronto in 2024. The alumni profile said they had first built humanoid robots and tested early prototypes in homes and hotels, and that feedback that those designs felt bulky and intrusive led them to the lamp.
Pulse 2.0 said the team includes researchers and engineers from Stanford, Harvard, the University of Toronto, UC Berkeley, Nuro, AMD, GM and Apple. The University of Toronto profile put the team at eight people and said Tan and Fung plan to open a Toronto office within a year.
The alumni profile said Syncere closed a $3.5m pre-seed round in under two weeks after a concept video that Tan posted on X in July 2025 drew more than four million views. The new $11m round is therefore not the company's first outside funding. The sources did not say how the two pre-seed amounts relate or give a total raised.
What the founders and investors said
Tan said: "Home robotics has a deployment problem disguised as a data problem." He added: "Every LUME we ship makes our technology smarter, and every software update makes the same robot more useful."
Andrew Chen, a general partner at a16z Speedrun, said: "What stood out to us about SYNCERE is that the company has designed distribution and learning together."
Company website: speedrun.a16z.com