Dream Labs raises $90M and launches Dream API

Dream Labs said its models learn how the physical world works from video and can control new robots without any data. | Source: Dream Labs

More brains are coming for robots. Dream Labs this week said it has raised $90 million in seed funding. The company also launched Dream API, a publicly available application programming interface to turn a robot’s camera feed and a plain-English instructions 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 most cannot transfer what they have learned to other machines, noted Dream Labs. 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, according to the San Francisco startup.

Dream Labs said its Dream-1 flagship model works across robots from different manufacturers. Trained on video of people performing everyday tasks, it can predict what will happen next and determine the robot’s resulting action. Because it learns from video rather than from a single machine, its capabilities transfer across hardware, Dream Labs claimed.

The company said Dream-1 can control any robot “out of the box” with grippers and zero-shot learning.

“The hardware is ready. What’s been missing is a brain any robot can use,” stated 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,” he added. “And instead of edited demos, we’re giving people a working model they can test themselves, mistakes included.”

B Capital and Kindred Ventures led the round. It also included participation from A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC, and Adrian Aoun, among others.

Inside Dream Labs’ product portfolio

Developers and robot enthusiasts can start using Dream Labs’ AI products today. The company said Dream API translates visual inputs and natural language prompts directly into robot actions.

Developers can sign up, connect any robots with grippers, and the robot will carry out the task. Dream Labs runs its models in data centers around the world, so robots respond quickly wherever they are.

The company also offers 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.

Developers also have access to Dream Labs’ 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.”

Startup works with more than 20 hardware partners

Dream Labs supports robots today that 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 over 20 hardware partners, Dream Labs said it 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 said it plans 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.”