Fauna's ‘friendly’ humanoid emerges from stealth

NYC startup Fauna Robotics emerged from two years of stealth development with Sprout, a 3.5-foot humanoid wrapped in sage-green foam designed to feel friendly and approachable rather than factory-ready.

The details:

Priced at $50K and shipping now, Sprout ships as a developer platform, with Disney, Boston Dynamics, UC San Diego, and NYU among the early customers.

The team built Sprout around safety-first principles — compliant joints, limited torques, and soft exteriors — so it can operate in homes and schools.

Sprout dances, fetches objects, rises from chairs unassisted, and can be piloted via game controller, phone app, or VR headset.

The robot ships with built-in localization, on-demand mapping, and a modular navigation stack for tracking position, avoiding obstacles, and planning routes

Why it matters

Fauna claims to be the first U.S. company actively shipping humanoids as a developer platform, betting that Sprout can spark the same software ecosystem that smartphones unleashed — at $50K a unit, roughly what research labs and tech entrepreneurs are already spending on China’s Unitree bots.