Dream Labs came out of stealth on October 19 with $90 million in seed funding and Dream API, the first public API for a robot foundation model — its Dream-1 model can control a two-armed robot it has never seen before, on tasks it was never shown, for $3 an hour. Why it matters: robot hardware has gotten cheap, but teaching each machine each task still takes specialists months. Dream Labs is betting the missing piece is a rentable brain, not another robot.
October 19, 2026
What happened
Dream Labs, a San Francisco company founded in 2026 by former leads of NVIDIA’s GR00T robotics research, announced a $90 million seed round led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures, with participation from A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC and Adrian Aoun, among others. The company said the money will go primarily toward compute as it expands the robots and tasks its model can handle.
Alongside the funding, Dream Labs launched three products: Dream API, which turns a robot’s camera feed and a plain-English instruction into motor commands; a fine-tuning service that returns a tailored model within hours from a small batch of demonstration data; and Robot Playground, a browser tool that lets anyone type commands to a robot in the company’s San Francisco office and watch it respond live.
How Dream-1 works
Dream-1 is what the company calls a World Action Model. Instead of training on data from one specific machine, it learned from video of people performing everyday tasks. It predicts what should happen next in a scene and works out the physical action the robot needs to take to make that happen. Because the learning comes from video rather than from a single robot’s joints, the company says the skill transfers across hardware.
Out of the box, Dream-1 handles tabletop tasks such as picking and placing objects and folding laundry on two-armed robots with parallel grippers, with no extra training data. Dream Labs says it works with more than 20 hardware partners whose robots cost roughly $2,000 to $10,000, and it refines the model for partner hardware. Support for wheeled mobile robots and more dexterous hands is planned next. SiliconANGLE reported pricing of $3 per hour for the full model.
Why it matters
The pitch is simple: a capable robot arm now costs about as much as a high-end laptop, but it ships with no intelligence. If a general model can be rented by the hour and works across brands, small makers can sell hardware without building an AI team, and buyers stop starting from zero every time they change machines or tasks. That is the “everything AI, tested” question here — the claims are the company’s, and the honest test is the public Playground and API, which anyone can try and watch fail in real time, mistakes included, as CEO Joel Jang put it.
Frequently asked questions
What is Dream-1?
Dream-1 is Dream Labs’ robot foundation model. It takes camera images and a natural-language instruction and returns robot actions, and the company says it can control new two-armed, parallel-gripper robots zero-shot, without fine-tuning.
How much does Dream API cost?
SiliconANGLE reported $3 per hour for the most powerful version of Dream-1. Dream Labs had not published a full price list in its announcement.
Who founded Dream Labs?
The company was founded in 2026 by former NVIDIA robotics researchers behind the DreamZero and World Action Models work and NVIDIA’s GR00T research, and is led by co-founder and CEO Joel Jang.
Sources: Business Wire, SiliconANGLE