Fauna Robotics is a New York City-based company building safe, approachable humanoid robots for shared human spaces.
Fauna Robotics is a robotics company based in New York City, founded in 2024 by former engineers from Meta and Google DeepMind. The company develops compact humanoid robots designed to safely operate alongside people in everyday environments, with a focus on accessibility, developer experience, and human-centered interaction. Its approach emphasizes safe physical design, expressive communication, and open software for embodied AI development. Its flagship platform, Sprout, is a lightweight humanoid robot built for research, education, retail, entertainment, and home services. Featuring compliant actuation, onboard AI computing, expressive facial animations, and developer-friendly APIs, Sprout provides an accessible platform for building and deploying embodied AI applications. Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Lux Capital, Fauna Robotics counts organizations including Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU among its early customers.
Platform maturity, autonomy stack, and flagship-system specifications in one view.
A concise view of platform maturity and deployment footprint.
Capabilities and model layers highlighted by the company.
Published operating specifications for the lead system.
Fauna Robotics was founded in 2024 by Rob Cochran (CEO, ex-Meta/Goldman Sachs), Josh Merel (CTO, ex-Google DeepMind, Nature paper on AI virtual rodent), and Lerrel Pinto (NYU professor). Cochran and Merel met at CTRL-labs, acquired by Facebook in 2019.
The team assembled veterans from CTRL-labs, Meta, DeepMind, and Amazon. Anthony Moschella, who designed Peloton hardware, led Sprout's industrial design. Funding exceeded $46 million from Kleiner Perkins, Lux Capital, and Quiet Capital.
Early customers include Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU, exploring retail, entertainment, hospitality, and education. Fauna bets that safe, friendly robots unlock use cases larger humanoids cannot.
Sprout debuted on January 27, 2026: 107cm tall, 22.7kg, 29 DOF, NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, ZED 2i vision, 360° LED face. Priced at $50,000 for the Creator Edition with unified SDK and teleoperation tools.
