Key Takeaways
- Dream Labs seed funding: $90 million, led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures, announced October 19, 2026.
- Dream API: a public interface that takes a robot's camera view and a plain-English instruction and returns motor commands.
- Dream-1 robot model: Dream Labs says it runs on robots from many makers and that robots will be able to pass along what they learn.
- Dream-1 tasks at launch, according to Dream Labs: tabletop jobs such as picking and placing objects and folding laundry.
Dream Labs, a San Francisco AI company, announced $90 million in seed funding led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures on October 19, 2026. Alongside the funding, it launched Dream API, a public interface that takes a robot's camera view and a plain-English instruction and returns motor commands, according to a Business Wire release.
How the $90 Million Seed Compares With Other Robotics Rounds
The $90 million seed is about 1.6 times the $55 million seed that Microagi, a Munich-based startup, raised in July 2026 led by Hummingbird, according to SiliconANGLE. Both announcements describe seed funding, so the comparison sets two rounds of the same stage side by side. Dividing 90 by 55 gives 1.64, which rounds to 1.6.
For more on robotics funding in 2026, see Robotics Funding Hits Record $18.8 Billion as Robots Move Into Food and Care.
What Dream API Gives Robot Makers and Developers
Dream Labs says its models learn how the physical world works from video and can control new robots without any data. The company says its API is the first publicly available one for a robot foundation model, one model that can power machines from many makers, and developers and robot makers can use it directly. The Robot Report describes the model in similar terms, reporting that Dream Labs says Dream-1 works across robots from different manufacturers and that robots will be able to transfer what they learn.
SiliconANGLE reports that Dream-1 learns from what Jang calls "human egocentric training data," which means videos of people doing physical tasks such as stacking shelves and packing items in boxes. For a related case, see Shift Is Giving San Francisco Free Private Chefs to Harvest Robot Training Data.
Joel Jang, co-founder and CEO of Dream Labs, said, "What's been missing is a brain any robot can use," and that Dream-1 lets a new robot do useful work in minutes, not months.
Which Robots and Tasks Dream-1 Covered at Launch
Dream Labs said at launch that Dream-1 worked on tabletop jobs such as picking and placing objects and folding laundry, and that support for wheeled mobile robots and dexterous hands would come next. The company also says the model needs no added data to run a two-armed robot with parallel grippers. Dream Labs also said the robots it supported at launch cost between about $2,000 and $10,000, and that it worked with more than 20 hardware partners.
Daisy Cai, a general partner at B Capital, said a capable robot arm has moved from the price of a luxury car to the price of a high-end laptop. She said the team did some of the defining work in robot learning at NVIDIA, and added: "Now anyone with an API key can build on it."
The named jobs are all tabletop work. Picking, placing and laundry folding describe the tasks Dream Labs said at launch that Dream-1 handled, and the release does not name a factory or warehouse that runs the model. The company's wider argument is that factories worldwide run a record 5 million industrial robots, and nearly every one is programmed for a single task.
People Also Ask
How much did Dream Labs raise in its seed round?
Dream Labs raised $90 million in seed funding led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures, announced on October 19, 2026. The release names A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC and Adrian Aoun as other participants, among others. The company says it will use the new funding primarily for computing power.
What is Dream API?
Dream API is a publicly available interface from Dream Labs that takes a robot's camera view and a plain-English instruction and returns motor commands. Dream Labs says it works even for robots the model has never seen before. Developers and robot makers get direct access to it, the company says.
Which robots does Dream-1 support?
At its October 19 launch, Dream Labs said it worked with more than 20 hardware partners and supported robots priced at about $2,000 to $10,000. At launch, the model handled tabletop jobs such as picking and placing objects and folding laundry. Support for wheeled mobile robots and dexterous hands was to come next, according to the company.
Who founded Dream Labs?
Joel Jang is co-founder and chief executive of Dream Labs, which is headquartered in San Francisco. The company says it was founded in 2026 by former leads of NVIDIA's GR00T robotics research.
Sources: Business Wire via Morningstar, The Robot Report, SiliconANGLE on Dream Labs, SiliconANGLE on Microagi.