Feather sells a $30,000 modular humanoid platform to developers

2 min read•Sep 25, 2026•

Feather Robotics has begun selling a modular humanoid platform for developers, first reported by TechCrunch. The $30,000 system gives developers a customizable hardware and software base for real-world tasks, while Feather says its robots are already working as cooks in restaurants and cleaning up science labs, with customers left unnamed.

The startup is taking a different route from Tesla and Figure. Those companies are pursuing both a robot body and a foundational AI system that is not yet widely deployed, while Feather provides a hardware and software toolkit for developers tackling real-world tasks now.

Its modular system supports changes such as different arm lengths and can run models from Nvidia, Skild, or Physical Intelligence. Feather has been selling small quantities of the robots, and revenue has surpassed $1 million. Separately, co-founder Hoa Mai said the startup had resolved almost all issues over the last year of field testing and was getting ready for a big product launch.

Gradient Ventures backed Feather at its inception, leading the startup’s previously announced $7.6 million pre-seed round. General partner Darian Shirazi believes Feather has no direct competitors in the U.S. and is the only U.S. startup developing a modular humanoid platform.

Mai acknowledged that Feather drew from Chinese robotics companies such as Unitree, while new foreign-made models are restricted from entering the U.S. market. The robot costs $30,000, about half the price of Unitree’s H2 Edu.

Shirazi compared that price with $50,000 to $60,000 a year for a laborer, plus training, HR, and other support mechanisms. He also said Feather had spent only a fraction of its pre-seed funding.

Feather’s pitch pairs a product already being sold with a bet on a broader application ecosystem. Mai says the physical-AI market is small today but expects the number of physical-AI application companies to be in the thousands in five years, and Feather hopes its platform will power them.

Oct 7, 2026

Arizona appeals court vacates manslaughter sentence after AI video

An Arizona appeals court vacated the 10.5-year sentence of Gabriel Horcasitas while upholding his manslaughter conviction, first reported by Nytimes. The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for resentencing without the video, after judges found that it presented scripted statements as if the victim himself were speaking in court.

The three-judge panel said the video generated a likeness of Christopher Pelkey’s voice and appearance but did not reflect actual events. It found that allowing and relying on the video made the sentencing fundamentally unfair, and noted that no prior Arizona case had addressed the admissibility of such a depiction at sentencing.

The judges said a victim’s right to speak cannot override a defendant’s right to be sentenced on accurate, reliable information. They said the video collapsed the distinction between the family’s belief about what Pelkey would have said and Pelkey’s own voice and opinions.

The ruling distinguishes family members speaking about Pelkey from a generated likeness that appeared to speak for him.

Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, presented the video during Horcasitas’s sentencing alongside victim-impact statements from family and friends. Wales wrote the script and said her husband and the couple’s longtime business partner helped create the video using Pelkey’s voice from a YouTube video and his face and torso from a funeral-service poster.

Judge Todd F. Lang praised the video as genuine, then imposed the maximum sentence of 10.5 years, more than the nine years prosecutors had sought.

Wales said nobody intended to make the court believe Pelkey was alive or that he had recorded the video before his death. She said she disagreed with the ruling and argued that families use slide shows, collages, hypothetical conversations and poetry to convey grief.

Wales compared the AI video with photography, saying it took 15 years of landmark cases around the 1860s before photography was widely accepted in courts.

The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for a new sentencing hearing without the AI-generated video.