Meet Feather, the startup building the ‘Android of robotics’ for developers

Feather’s other advantage is its price. The robot costs $30,000, which is about half the price Unitree’s H2 Edu.

Shirazi believes the market size at that price could be very large. “You would hire a laborer for $50,000 to $60,000 a year, you’d have to train . They’d have to have HR. They’d have to have all these different support mechanisms,” he said. “You can now buy a Feather robot to do that.”

Feather is also operating extremely efficiently, having spent only a fraction of its pre-seed funding, according to Shirazi.

The startup’s big bet, of course, is that the value in robotics will come from an ecosystem developed around the hardware.

“If we think about the market size today for physical AI companies, it’s very small,” Mai said. “But if you think about how many physical AI application companies will probably exist in five years, we expect it to be in the thousands.”

Feather hopes to be the platform that powers all of them.