Flourish 1 Home Robot Costs $3,555 and Ships 50 Units in December

Flourish, a San Francisco and Paris startup founded in January 2026, opened pre-orders on September 29 for the Flourish 1, a wheeled home robot priced at $3,555, with the first 50 units due in December. Each arm lifts 1.5 kilograms, and the robot's main computer is a Raspberry Pi.

The number that matters is not the price but the 50: at $3,555 a unit, the entire first batch is worth at most $177,750 in pre-orders. That is a field trial, and the company's launch release is the only statement of its terms so far.

What the Flourish 1 is, per its makers

The Robot Report's Mike Oitzman describes a six-wheeled base with two articulated arms, two-fingered grippers with wrist-mounted cameras, and lidar for obstacle detection. Battery life is designed for 12 hours of arm operation; the robot is not waterproof.

Founder Antoine Marcel describes the training method in the article: "When you are training your robot to water your plants, you just take your phone, move your phone, and it will move the arms." The phone's inertial sensors drive the arms in teleoperation, and the company's release says a household task can be taught in 30 minutes with no coding.

The release lists tasks the robot can repeat and schedule: picking up shoes, clothes and toys, loading the dishwasher, wiping tables, watering plants, fetching items and clearing a cat litter box.

Where the two accounts disagree

Oitzman's article says the robot is aimed at tidying, trash removal and wiping surfaces, and not at dishes, water-based tasks or fine assembly work. The company's release lists loading a dishwasher and watering plants among its capabilities, and Marcel's own quote is about watering plants. I could not reconcile the two from the documents. Neither states a success rate for any task.

Compute is split. The Raspberry Pi handles the robot itself, while cloud GPUs train the skill models and run inference for higher-level behaviours, with optional local processing, per Robot Report. The release does not specify battery, compute or any subscription fee, so what a cloud dependency costs a household each month is unknown.

Against a factory humanoid

Set beside Agility's Digit 5, whose figures come from the company's announcement and IEEE Spectrum's reporting, the Flourish 1 sits at the other end of the payload and price range. Digit 5 figures are vendor-supplied, and the Digit 5 bill-of-materials range is IEEE Spectrum's reading of Agility's SEC filings.

	Flourish 1	Digit 5
Price or build cost	$3,555 price	$150,000 to $200,000 build cost
Payload	1.5 kg per arm	22.7 kg
First deliveries	December 2026, 50 units	early access H1 2027
Named deployment	none	9 sites (Digit 4)

Funding around it is uneven: Feather raised $7.6 million to build software for robot developers, and Sima.ai raised $1.45 billion for physical-A.I. chips. Flourish's round was led by Families Fund, whose founder Kartik Sathappan is quoted in the release: "Flourish does the chores so parents can play with their kids." The amount raised is not disclosed.

What is not shown

There is no independent demonstration, no figure on how much of each task is autonomous once taught, and no statement of how often a human must step in. Teaching by phone teleoperation is not the same as autonomy; the robot has to reproduce the motion in a kitchen it has not seen before, with two-fingered grippers and a 1.5 kg limit per arm.

The next checkpoint is December 2026. If 50 units ship, the useful evidence is the delivered task list and how many households still do the chores by hand a month later.