Nori

YC company profile

The most capable American-made humanoid robot for $1,688

We manufacture Nori: A sub-$2000 bimanual mobile manipulator that can clean rooms, restock shelves, and fold clothes. Nori can handle basic tasks out of the box, and its software lets anyone teach Nori to automate work specific to their home or business.

Nori aims to solve the robotics data bottleneck. By deploying affordable robots to customers around the world, we can gather the diverse data required to train the next generation of generalist robotic policies. Every user of Nori makes Nori smarter.

Since launching 6 weeks ago we have already deployed our first robot and have over $440k+ in sales.

We can bring general-purpose robotics to homes and businesses that could never afford it before. There are 132.7 million households and 8.4 million employer business locations in the U.S. At $1,688 per robot, selling just one Nori to 0.5% of them represents a $1.2B market opportunity in the U.S. alone.

• YC batch: Summer 2026
• Founded: 2026
• Team size: 5
• Location: San Francisco
• Country: US
• Status: Active
• Industry: Industrials
• Stage: Early
• Tags: Hard Tech, Hardware, Robotics
• YC partner: Gustaf Alstromer

Founders

Antonio Sitong Li — Founder/CTO

Antonio is the founder of Nori Robotics. He studied Computer Science and Architecture at Columbia, where he held research fellowships with the Laidlaw Scholars Program, the Data Science Institute, and the Graphics & UI Lab. His research focused on teaching robots new tasks through VR demonstrations.

He also holds a national patent for a computer-vision system, and previously co-founded Truely, which grew to 2,000+ users and 1.5M+ impressions.

LinkedIn · X

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

Robots are finally capable enough to be useful, but they're priced like cars, not appliances. A capable humanoid costs $20,000+, so general-purpose robots stay in labs and pilots instead of homes.

It's a big problem because household labor is one of the largest unpriced markets in the world. Today's answer is a stack of single-task machines, a dishwasher, a washer, a vacuum, each $600 to $1,000 and doing exactly one thing. Whoever ships a general-purpose robot at appliance prices doesn't win a niche, they open consumer robotics the way the PC opened computing.

We're robotics researchers from Columbia (RoboPIL, CGUI). After years watching [$100K research robots struggle with tasks cheap hardware could handle], we realized the gap between lab robots and home robots isn't intelligence, it's cost discipline. Nobody was going to fix that from inside a lab, so we left to build it: a $1,688 robot anyone can teach.

Source: Y Combinator · Retrieved 2026-11-02. Company information is self-reported on YC.