Dream Labs raises a $90m seed to sell a robot brain through an API

Dream Labs raises a $90m seed to sell a robot brain through an API

19 October 2026: Dream Labs, a San Francisco company building a foundation model to control robots, has raised $90 million in seed funding led by B Capital with Kindred Ventures, and launched Dream API, which it describes as the first publicly available API that turns a robot's camera feed and a plain-English instruction into motor commands. Most of the money goes on compute.

Not yet independently verified. The company's release is published on Business Wire and we found no copy on its own site; the capability claims are Dream Labs' own. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The round and the team

A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC and Adrian Aoun also invested, among others. The company was founded in 2026 by former leads of NVIDIA's GR00T robotics research, the researchers behind DreamZero and World Action Models, and is led by co-founder and chief executive Joel Jang. Daisy Cai, a general partner at B Capital, said the team "did some of the defining work in robot learning at NVIDIA. Now anyone with an API key can build on it."

"The hardware is ready. What's been missing is a brain any robot can use," Jang said. He compares a new robot to a rental car: the driver finds the controls and past experience does the rest, so "a new robot can do useful work in minutes, not months."

What Dream-1 does

The flagship model, Dream-1, is trained on video of people doing everyday tasks; it predicts what will happen next and works out the robot's action from that, which the company says lets its skills transfer across hardware from different makers. Out of the box it controls robots with grippers zero-shot, including two-armed robots with parallel grippers, and today handles tabletop work such as picking and placing objects and folding laundry, with wheeled mobile robots and dexterous hands to follow. Dream Labs works with more than 20 hardware partners whose robots cost between about $2,000 and $10,000, and refines the model for each.

The products on sale from launch are Dream API, run from data centres around the world; fine-tuning as a service, which turns a small batch of demonstration data into a tailored model within hours; and a browser playground where anyone can command a robot in the company's office. Ryan Chan, chief executive of MakerMods, which sells $2,000 two-armed robot arms, said his robot "was up and running in a few minutes and attempting tasks we never programmed."

Why it matters for automation buyers

The company frames the problem as factories running a record 5 million industrial robots, nearly all programmed for a single task, while cheap arms ship with no intelligence at all. A model sold by the hour through an API would move robot programming from integration projects towards software subscriptions, though the tasks Dream-1 handles today are light tabletop work. Our robotics integrator category lists 25 companies and our robot manufacturer category 57.

Company profile on TrustList: Dream Labs

Sources

• Dream Labs (via Business Wire): Dream Labs raises $90M seed to build the brain for everyday robots, 19 October 2026