American-made bimanual home robot at an appliance price point
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2026 | Employees: 5 | Stage: Seed (Y Combinator S26) | Website: https://www.norirobotics.com
Founded in 2026 by Columbia robotics researcher Antonio Sitong Li and based in San Francisco, Nori builds a home robot called the A3. It rolls on wheels rather than walking, has two arms that can each lift about 1.5 kg, and includes four cameras, an onboard computer, a speaker and microphone for voice commands, and lidar for sensing. Battery life is quoted at six to eight hours, and the full price is $1,688. Nori says it shipped its first units and passed $440,000 in sales within about six weeks. Owners teach it tasks through a companion app and can share those skills with other users. The longer-term plan is not really about chores: selling affordable robots at scale is how the company gathers the varied real-world data needed to train better general-purpose robots, so each customer helps the next one work better. A second version, the Nori L3, targets universities and robotics researchers.
Nori is betting the home robot problem is about price, not intelligence. Instead of legs and a human-shaped body, it sells a rolling machine with two arms for $1,688 — about the price of a fridge. Every cheap robot sold also collects real-world training data, so the goal is thousands of units in homes rather than profit on each one. The catch: reviewers describe the A3 as a developer kit wearing a consumer pitch, and five people are competing against far better-funded rivals.
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