Insider Brief
- Dream Labs raised $90 million in seed funding led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures to expand Dream-1, a robot foundation model designed to control hardware from different manufacturers.
- The company also launched Dream API, which converts robot camera feeds and natural-language instructions into motor commands, along with a fine-tuning service and browser-based Robot Playground.
- Dream Labs said Dream-1 can already handle tasks such as picking, placing and folding laundry, is working with more than 20 hardware partners and plans to use much of the funding for computing infrastructure as it expands supported robots and tasks.
Dream Labs has raised $90 million in seed funding to build AI models that can control robots from different manufacturers.
B Capital and Kindred Ventures led the round, with participation from A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC and others. Dream Labs, founded in 2026 by former Nvidia robotics researchers who worked on the company’s GR00T research program and projects including DreamZero and World Action Models, indicated it plans to use much of the funding for computing infrastructure as it expands the number of robots and tasks supported by its models
Dream Labs’ main model, Dream-1, is designed to work across different types of robot hardware rather than being trained for a single machine. The model learns from videos of people performing everyday tasks and uses that information to predict what should happen next and generate corresponding robot actions.
“The hardware is ready. What’s been missing is a brain any robot can use,” co-founder and CEO Joel Jang said in the announcement. “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. And instead of edited demos, we’re giving people a working model they can test themselves, mistakes included.”
The company said Dream-1 can control robots equipped with grippers without additional training and currently handles tabletop tasks including picking and placing objects and folding laundry. Support for wheeled mobile robots and more dexterous robotic hands is planned.
Dream API & Fine-tuning Service
Alongside the funding, Dream Labs launched Dream API, which the company describes as the first publicly available API for a robot foundation model. Developers can connect a supported robot, provide a camera feed and give it a natural-language instruction, with Dream Labs’ cloud-based model generating the motor commands needed to carry out the task.
Dream Labs is also offering a fine-tuning service for robots or tasks that require additional training. Developers can submit a small set of demonstration data, which the company said can be used to produce a customized version of the model within hours.
Robot Playground
A third product, Robot Playground, allows users to remotely send commands through a browser to a robot located in Dream Labs’ San Francisco office and watch the results live.
Dream Labs said it is working with more than 20 hardware partners whose supported robots generally cost between about $2,000 and $10,000. For those partners, the company further adapts Dream-1 to individual machines beyond its baseline ability to operate two-armed robots with parallel grippers.
“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.”
