Weave Robotics is betting you’ll never have to fold your laundry again.
Since the San Francisco-based startup posted a video of its Isaac 1 home robot deftly folding clothes and tidying up around the house, the clip has racked up more than 18 million views on X. Some wondered why it moved so slowly, while others couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.
The attention comes as the Y Combinator-backed startup, founded two years ago by former Apple engineers, prepares to ship Isaac 1 in California this fall. At $7,999 upfront, or $449 a month, the wheeled robot is significantly cheaper than rivals like 1X’s Neo, which is expected to cost about $20,000. Sunday Robotics and Tesla are also racing to bring robots into the home.
CEO Kaan Dogrusoz and his longtime friend and cofounder Evan Wineland want to bring Isaac 1 to 1,000 US homes by the end of 2027. For now, though, only a small number of Isaac 0s, an earlier version of the robot, are in homes around California. Dogrusoz declined to say exactly how many, but said Weave has more robots deployed than employees. The company has 20. It also has specialists in San Francisco who can control the robot remotely when needed.
Weave Robotics
Business Insider spoke with Dogrusoz about why he thinks wheels beat legs in the home, how much of Isaac’s work is actually autonomous, and why he believes people will forgive a slow robot if it means never having to fold laundry again.
The interview has been edited for clarity.
Business Insider: Was laundry always the challenge you wanted to crack with a robot?
Kaan Dogrusoz: Laundry felt like the obvious first thing to tackle since we founded the company. It was an ideal first use case for a couple of reasons. First, it’s unobjectionable. Some people treat laundry as a habit they don’t mind, but I don’t think anyone would say they love folding their own laundry the way people love cooking, for example. Laundry is just something people should be able to save time on.
Second, if you get the core task — folding — right, you save families tens of hours a week, and the robot can do it from one spot without navigating your whole home. That combination made it a great first task.
How did you design Isaac 1?
Two principles drive the design. First, the robot has to be capable. Nothing else matters if it can’t do the task well. Second, you have to be comfortable around it. It has to feel at home in your home. Put those together, and you get a design with no wasted detail or extra complexity. It’s just great at what it does.
Weave Robotics
What about the look of the robot?
The fabric casing on the exterior has been part of our vision since founding the company. It’s in the name, Weave. We figured out a way to wrap the robot in a soft yet elegant material, so you get a literal soft feel and a visual one.
Humanoid robots are pretty controversial in Silicon Valley. Why did you decide to go for wheels instead of legs? And why is the torso so broad?
We built Isaac pragmatically, focused on how the robot adds value through manipulation. That means two competent arms that can handle big payloads, so that they can carry big laundry hampers and fold large pants, large towels, bedspreads, blankets, you name it.
While it’s doing that, it has to be safe 100% of the time, not 90%. Wheels keep the robot passively balanced, so we never have to worry about it losing power, falling, and damaging property or hurting someone.
Weave Robotics
Once robots are in the home, is teleoperation involved?
Yes. Isaac 0 has been deployed in our customers’ homes for many months now. They are running mostly autonomously, but to make sure we always complete the folds in unseen conditions [such as when the robot encounters a garment it has never folded before], we do require interventions every now and then. All of our customers are aware of this.
The way I see autonomy improving for robots is that laundry folding is our first task. We will always have tasks we are comfortable defaulting to autonomy on, and those are the tasks that are core to Isaac 1. We will continue rolling out new features on top that may require intervention. You can visualize it as a boundary that keeps expanding. We start with folding, and then we expand into other use cases.
Weave Robotics
A lot of comments on your launch video fixated on how Isaac appeared to be slow at folding laundry and tidying up. How do you respond to that criticism?
Obviously, we want everything to happen fast. But building a first-of-its-kind product is about focusing on the right things, and for us, that’s quality. If someone has to refold the laundry themselves, there’s no point in having the robot.
Speed will keep improving. When we started, a T-shirt fold could take up to four minutes. Now it’s closer to two, depending on the item. It’s hard to convey this in a video, but the way our robots work in practice is: you go to work, the robot works for hours, and by the time you’re back, it’s done. That’s a magical feeling, and it doesn’t really matter how long it took.
What do you think about the competitive landscape? Sunday is shipping a similar product this fall, and so is 1X.
We welcome it. As far as I know, we’re the only company that’s shipped robots like this into homes, and this is a very new product category. This isn’t a zero-sum game. More products out there helping people in their daily lives is a good thing.
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