Is Silicon Valley ready to put robots in people’s homes? Hello Robot is.

Martinez, California, is about as far as you can get from Silicon Valley and still be in the San Francisco Bay Area. Perched on the northeast edge of the bay, the small city is home to Hello Robot, a startup that itself is about as far as one can get from the maximalist promises of its robotics rivals 45 miles south.

Hello Robot released the fourth iteration of its home assistance robot, Stretch, last month. And you might stretch to call it a humanoid robot. While Stretch boasts a vaguely human torso and sensor-studded head, its telescoping arm has a pair of pinchers, and it rides around on a heavy, omnidirectional wheeled base.

When Stretch’s batteries run down, lights around its “eyes” glow — “it looks angry,” Blaine Matulevich, an engineer at the company, jokes.

Hello Robot, founded in 2017 by CEO Aaron Edsinger, a former director of robotics at Google, and CTO Charlie Kemp, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is not building a foundation model or promising to take over every job a human can do. Hello Robot developed Stretch to do something many other robots aren’t doing: Working in real homes, with real people, at a time when most are behind glass in laboratories.

This is vital. While the latest advances in artificial intelligence promise more capabilities for robots, there is a dearth of useful training data. And while simulation is improving, investors are increasingly focused on deployment.

“Companies that deploy first accumulate site-specific recovery loops and workflow tolerances that no competitor can buy or synthesize,” Bullhound Capital wrote in a report on the sector published last week. “In robotics, the moat isn’t just IP, but accumulated operating hours under real-world liability.”

Keith Platt, an investor in Georgia who now sits on Hello Robot’s board, invested in the company after taking on Stretch as a housemate. Platt became quadriplegic in 2021, only able to control parts of his shoulders, his neck and his head. He began exploring adaptive technology, and in 2024 started working with Hello Robot, which has an occupational therapist on the team to support its work with Platt and other people with similar conditions.

Platt controls his Stretch using a voice-operated iPhone app; he can task it to autonomously move to somewhere in his house, then take over direct control to manipulate objects and perform tasks. One deceptively simple project has been figuring out how to get Stretch to serve him a protein shake for breakfast, which normally requires the assistance of another person.

“When we first started out with