Full Name
Cartwheel Robotics, Inc.
About
Cartwheel Robotics, Inc. was a San Francisco company founded in 2022 by Scott LaValley, who had worked at both Boston Dynamics and Disney, and it has closed after four years in operation as what Chinese coverage called the first humanoid robot company to fold that year. The founding motive is unusually specific and the founder told it himself: at Boston Dynamics, he said, the company was known for building terrifying robots, and although he loved working on Atlas because it represented advanced robotics, his children found it frightening, whereas at Disney they smiled at Baby Groot and wanted to hug it, which he described as the experience he wanted robots to deliver. He turned down a job offer from Figure AI and started Cartwheel Robotics in 2022 with the goal of building a general-purpose home companion, defining the product as a small friendly humanoid meant to bring joy, warmth and a little everyday magic into the spaces people live in, expressive, emotionally intelligent and with a personality of its own, something you can feel rather than merely a technical product. The company built two prototypes. Yogi has a toddler-like body with rounded lines, a large head and a slightly chubby build, which is exactly what makes it read as friendly and approachable, and it was designed to sweep, do housework and keep children company. Speedy was the simpler of the two, intended as a short-term customisable commercial platform, similar to Baby Groot but able to be cast as any character a user wanted and not limited to Disney use. Underneath the movement sat a motion language model, which the company showed off only months before it closed, aimed at letting the robot understand and respond to spoken instructions the way a person would and convey emotion and intent through movement. The business was thin: a team of seven people raised about three million US dollars and used it to develop Yogi and build a complete robotics laboratory in under a year, and the only separately reported investment was a US$150,000 strategic investment from the Canadian investment company New Wave. What ended it was the inability to raise further: the founder said in a farewell letter that in hardware, capital is like oxygen, that they had talked seriously with leading venture firms, institutional investors and global customers without finding a partner able to bridge the gap between technical breakthrough and commercial potential, and that no money is better than the wrong money. The company's site stopped resolving overnight, and the domain now serves an unrelated retail business, so nothing recorded here comes from the manufacturer.
Technical Overview
Contact Information
Robot Products
Yogi
Released 2025
Funding History
Total $150K| Round | Amount | Valuation | Date | Investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other | $150K | - | - | New Wave | Source |
Development Timeline
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