Dream Labs, an AI company building the brain for everyday robots, today announced $90 million in seed funding led by B Capital along with Kindred Ventures, with participation from A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC, and Adrian Aoun, among others. Alongside the financing, the company launched Dream API, the first publicly available API that turns a robot’s camera feed and a plain-English instruction into motor commands, even for robots it has never seen before.
Factories worldwide run a record 5 million industrial robots, yet nearly every one is programmed for a single task, and what it learns can’t transfer to another machine. Low-cost robots now sell for a few thousand dollars but ship with no built-in intelligence. Teaching one robot one task can take specialists months, and a new task or new hardware often means starting from zero.
Dream Labs’ flagship model, Dream-1, works across robots from different manufacturers. Trained on video of people performing everyday tasks, it predicts what will happen next and determines the robot’s resulting action. Because it learns from video rather than from a single machine, its capabilities transfer across hardware. Out of the box, Dream-1 can control any robot with grippers, zero-shot.
“The hardware is ready. What’s been missing is a brain any robot can use,” said Joel Jang, co-founder and CEO of Dream Labs. “When you get into a rental car, you don’t relearn how to drive. You find the controls and your past driving experience does the rest. Dream-1 approaches a new robot the same way, so a new robot can do useful work in minutes, not months. And instead of edited demos, we’re giving people a working model they can test themselves, mistakes included.”
Developers and robot enthusiasts can start using Dream Labs products today:
- Dream API: The first publicly available API that translates visual inputs and natural language prompts directly into robot actions. Developers sign up, connect any robots with grippers, and the robot carries out the task. Dream Labs runs its models in data centers around the world, so robots respond quickly wherever they are.
- Fine-tuning as a Service: For unsupported hardware or new capabilities, developers and robot makers can submit a small batch of demonstration data to receive a tailored model within hours.
- Robot Playground: Anyone with a browser can type commands to a robot in Dream Labs’ San Francisco office and watch it respond live and unedited, no robot purchase required.
“A capable robot arm has gone from the price of a luxury car to the price of a high-end laptop. What it needs now is intelligence,” said Daisy Cai, General Partner at B Capital. “This team did some of the defining work in robot learning at NVIDIA. Now anyone with an API key can build on it.”
Dream Labs works with more than 20 hardware partners, and the robots it supports today cost between about $2,000 and $10,000. Dream-1 needs no extra data to control a two-armed robot with parallel grippers. For its 20+ hardware partners, Dream Labs goes beyond that baseline, refining the model for each robot so it performs at its best. Dream-1 currently handles tabletop tasks such as picking and placing objects and folding laundry, with support for wheeled mobile robots and dexterous hands to follow. The company will use the new funding primarily for compute as it expands the tasks and robots Dream-1 can handle, and scales to support more users.
“Our customers buy our robots to build things, and the hardest part has always been getting them to do actual work,” said Ryan Chan, Co-founder and CEO of MakerMods, which sells $2,000 bimanual robot arms. “With Dream-1, our robot was up and running in a few minutes and attempting tasks we never programmed. We can focus on building better hardware, and our customers get intelligence that keeps improving.”
About Dream Labs
Dream Labs is an AI company building the brain for everyday robots. Its models learn how the physical world works from video and can control new robots without any data, so a single model can power machines from many makers. Dream Labs offers the first publicly available API for a robot foundation model, giving developers and robot makers direct access to general-purpose robot intelligence. Founded in 2026 by former leads of NVIDIA’s GR00T robotics research, Dream Labs is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more at dreamlabs.ai.
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