Shepherd Robotics
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About Shepherd Robotics
YC company profile
Robots for high skilled labor powering AI infrastructure
Shepherd Robotics builds general purpose robots for skilled physical work across AI infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. Our robots are powered by robot foundation models and use modular, flexible hardware designed to adapt to different environments and tasks. We train our systems on a combination of real world and simulation data so they can learn complex manipulation skills and generalize across workflows. We also provide integration into customers’ existing workflows, starting with data center construction and operations, electrical manufacturing and testing, and electronics manufacturing, where traditional automation struggles with variability, dexterity, and changing environments.
- YC batch: Fall 2026
- Founded: 2026
- Team size: 4
- Location: San Francisco
- Country: US
- Status: Active
- Industry: Industrials
- Stage: Early
- Tags: Hardware, Robotics, Manufacturing, Automation, AI
- YC partner: Charlie Warren
Founders
Feifei Duan — Founder/CEO
Cofounder and CEO at Shepherd Robotics. Ex-Waymo and Chef Robotics engineer.
Trained large transformer models at Waymo and deployed robots into large food factories at Chef Robotics.
David Fang — Founder/CTO
David Fang is co-founder and CTO of Shepherd Robotics. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Dyna Robotics working on large-scale robot learning, and building ML systems for autonomous driving at Cruise.
Kai Ru — Founder
Founder at Shepherd Robotics. x Cruise & Rivian self driving cars, planning, research, foundational models.
Source: Y Combinator · Retrieved 2026-11-02. Company information is self-reported on YC.