Feather Robotics Raises $7.6 Million Pre-Seed and Prices Its Robot at $29,990

Feather Robotics raised a $7.6 million pre-seed round led by Gradient Ventures and is selling a modular wheeled robot for $29,990, TechCrunch reported on Sept. 24. The company says it has already passed $1 million in revenue.

Pre-seed is the earliest institutional stage, and the announcement does not give a valuation, a post-money figure or the names of any investors beyond the lead. Gradient Ventures backed the company at its inception, according to TechCrunch.

What $29,990 buys

Feather was founded in 2025 by Hoa Mai and Parsa Bakhtiari. TechCrunch said Mai previously led a humanoid startup that 1X acquired, and Bakhtiari is a former Tesla Model 3 engineer. Feather's pitch is an "Android of robotics": hardware that developers can reconfigure, for example by changing arm length, running whichever robot model they choose.

The robot is a wheeled mobile manipulator with two arms and a torso that can rise, according to a write-up by the technology writer John Koetsier, who reported a runtime of 10 hours. TechCrunch said it supports models from Nvidia, Skild and Physical Intelligence, and costs about half what Unitree charges for its H2 Edu.

Neither source gives a payload, a height, a degree-of-freedom count or a shipping date. Those are the numbers a buyer needs to compare it with the Unitree machine it is measured against.

Item	Reported	Not disclosed
Round	$7.6 million pre-seed	Valuation, other investors
Price	$29,990	Shipping date
Revenue	Over $1 million	Units sold
Runtime	10 hours	Payload, height

Revenue is not units

The $1 million figure is a company claim, relayed by TechCrunch. At $29,990 a robot, $1 million is at most 33 units, and fewer if any of it came from services or development kits. Feather says robots are working as cooks in restaurants and cleaning laboratories. It has not named a customer.

That gap between a money figure and a machine count has come up before. The Terminal's piece on Agility Robotics' Digit 5 found $300 million in orders covering fewer than 1,000 robots, and the same arithmetic applies on a smaller scale here. A related pattern is Workhorse's 200-truck order against 26 deliveries in a quarter: an order is a promise, and a delivery is a fact.

The competitive claim

Darian Shirazi, a partner at Gradient Ventures, said, according to TechCrunch, that Feather is the only U.S. startup building a modular humanoid platform, and that foreign-made rivals are now restricted from U.S. markets. TechCrunch's article does not say which restriction he means, and The Terminal has not verified the claim. Unitree, the price comparison TechCrunch uses, is a Chinese company.

Mai said: "If you think about how many physical AI application companies will probably exist in five years, we expect it to be in the thousands." The bet is that those companies will want a body they did not have to build, and Feather's ceiling is set by how many of them buy one.

The next observable data point is a delivery. Feather has not said when its first customer units ship, and a named deployment with a unit count would settle what the $1 million represents.