A new startup founded by Kyle Vogt, the former co-founder of self-driving car company Cruise, wants to build household robots to take those tedious tasks off your plate. Kyle announced the new venture, called The Bot Company, in a post on X this week.
“I’m back to building! Excited to share I’ve started a company with Paril Jain and Luke Holoubek,” wrote Vogt. “We’re building bots that do chores so you don’t have to. Everyone is busy. Bots can help.”
The idea behind The Bot Company is to apply robotics and AI to mundane household chores like cleaning, laundry, and meal prep – freeing up human time and energy. As Kyle points out, modern life is incredibly hectic with long commutes, intense work schedules, and endless to-do lists, having robot assistants to offload repeating cleaning and cooking tasks could be a gamechanger.
“Our team has spent years building robots (including the self-driving kind) that give people some of that time back, and we’re taking that a step further with this company,” Kyle Vogt wrote.
The startup has already raised a massive $150 million seed round from top Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs. Kyle Vogt’s co-founder Paril Jain, former head of planning at Tesla AI, is serving as CTO.
From Robotaxis to Robot Maids
Paril Jain noted this isn’t The Bot Company’s founders’ first rodeo when it comes to cutting-edge robotics. At Cruise and Tesla, they were pioneers in self-driving vehicle technology. Now they’re pivoting that expertise to household robots.
“We’ve come a long way from barely being able to stay in lane, to building Navigate on Autopilot, Smart Summon, Autonomy day push…rewriting entire to stack to build FSD V0-11 and doing that again to build V12,” wrote Jain, referencing Tesla’s self-driving capabilities. “While I had always planned to help Tesla get to global Robotaxi deployment, I think it’s time to accelerate the rest of the robotics industry.”
Paril Jain is vague on what exactly The Bot Company’s first household robot products will look like. But you can imagine Rosie the Robot maid from The Jetsons – an intelligent assistant that cleans up messes, does laundry, cooks meals, and tackles boring chores. Robot vacuums like Roombas are just the start.