Former Meta Employees Launch Sprout, an Adorable Humanoid Robot for Developers

A visit to a research lab takes on a surprising museum-quality feel on occasion. For all the cutting-edge research that happens between these walls, ancient equipment has a way of sticking around. This is especially true for robotics. When your facility spends good money on a system, you hang on with dear life.  

To this day, you’ll encounter Willow Garage PR-2s, Rethink Baxters, and Nao robots in the wild. Price is a factor. These robots are big investments. Even more troublingly, however, is the fact that no one seems to make them anymore. In each of the above examples, that’s a simple matter of those companies simply not existing.  

The bigger underlying issue here, however, seems to be one of economics. These systems are a loss leader. Historically, there haven’t been enough customers to justify their production. It’s no coincidence that many of the robots — like Baxter — were designed for a wholly different purpose.  

No one goes into the category expecting to print money. The value prop for manufacturers is that familiar lifehack Apple embraced in the 80s, getting an entire generation of school kids hooked on its product. Certainly, there’s something to be said for ensuring the next wave of robotics engineers learn their trade using your platform. 

Founded by two former Meta employees, Fauna doesn’t expect to be fully sustained by the developer market — but it’s a start. On Tuesday, the Manhattan-based company emerged from stealth to debut its first robot. It is, by all reasonable metrics, a humanoid. Its place in the world, however, is neither moving warehouse totes nor vacuuming floors. Rather, Sprout is aimed at the humans building the robots who might eventually perform those tasks.  

The little router-headed robot is a platform, designed to help researchers, schools, developers, startups, and the like build humanoid applications. A close analog might be found in the different systems developed by the Hugging Face-owned Pollen Robotics, in that — unlike many earlier examples — Sprout is built specifically with this market in mind.  The market is larger, more mature, and a hell of a lot better funded than it was when PR2 hit the market just over 15 years ago.  

“We have a really broad range of customers who are developers,” cofounder and CEO Rob Cochran tells me. “They are businesses and individuals with technical skills who have ideas that they want to express on a robotics platform. We have Disney and Parks and Entertainment looking at accelerating and doing a lot of iteration on character-based experiences in parks. We've got Boston Dynamics interested — obviously, they have a deep history in industrial robotics.” 

Universities including NYU and UCSD have also signed up for early access to Sprout, along with labs building AI world models. Cochran says the team settled on a bipedal humanoid form factor due to the manner of generality it affords researchers in real-world testing and — eventually — deployment.  Boston Dynamics Consulting is a potential example of that deployment, as it explores what additional humanoid robots might look like in real-world spaces, beyond the sorts of factories and warehouses its parent company is targeting with Atlas. 

While the industrial world may soon be awash with different humanoids, the Fauna team believes that these systems won’t afford developers the accessibility and flexibility required for building with limited resources.  

“We're calling it the Creator Edition because it's a full-featured developer platform that you know, researchers, developers, corporate labs as well as, you know, start-ups can use, you know, many robots,” cofounder and CTO, Josh Merel, tells me.  “There aren't that many robots available in the first place, but those that are available are often quite powerful, quite heavy. You need a deep robotics background, to really build on top of it. We’re making this a lot more accessible to people who have machine learning backgrounds and want to play with LLM agents on a robot in the real world in a way that's safer and makes more sense than deploying it on hardware that really isn't well suited to that.” 

Fauna’s cofounders previously crossed paths at Meta. Cochran was head of product for CTRL-labs, when the social media giant acquired the neural interface startup in 2019. Merel joined the team two years later, exiting Google DeepMind to serve as the division’s research scientist & manager.  

After a stint at Goldman-Sachs, Cochran convinced Merel to embrace startup life. “The thing that united Josh and I was shipping a product,” he says. “It felt like, given how the space is evolving, the best way to do that quickly and in a highly opinionated way was in a startup. It gave us a chance to really put on paper together an idea we had for a product and in two years get it out the door.” 

The Creator Edition of Sprout represents that initial step out the door. It’s the first in what the company hopes will be a long line of robots. Before robots can safely find their way into homes, someone needs to get them into developer hands.  

“Right now the robot costs about $50,000,” says Cochran. “Not inexpensive for an individual, certainly, but for an institution that's focused on this sort of work, and relative to other platforms that are available, it’s a very, very achievable price point. We layer a lot onto it. It’s not just hardware you're getting out of the box. It's a developer experience that includes infrastructure that supports simulation work that supports, you know, training models, that mapping and navigation stack voice interaction. All of these pieces get layered into a single system.” 

The hope is to get the price down to around 1/5^th of where it currently is. Of course, that will take time and scale. Fauna believes Sprout can help it take those important first steps.  

The A3 Humanoid Robot Forum is Happening at Automate 2026!

As humanoid robots transition from experimental labs to the factory floor, the Humanoid Robot Forum provides the blueprint for what comes next. This intensive two-day event, taking place from June 23-24 at Automate in Chicago, explores the cutting-edge insights into the performance constraints and measurable outcomes of today's most advanced bionic systems. Learn more and join us there!