The bottleneck for household robots is not intelligence, but price
Headquarters
San Francisco
Employee
—
Models here
1
Listings
0
Nori Robotics is a small startup from San Francisco with five employees and comes from the Y Combinator summer 2026 cohort. It was founded by Antonio Sitong Li, previously a robotics researcher at Columbia University. The company's thesis contradicts the industry mainstream: it is not the lack of intelligence holding back the household robot, but simply the price. Accordingly, everything is subordinated to cost reduction.
The first serious product is the NORI A3, a dual-arm robot on a square mobile base with a three-stage telescopic column, 19 degrees of freedom, and a weight of 20.4 kilograms. The predecessor L2 was still a modified wheeled platform. The technology is consistently economical: a Raspberry Pi 5 runs on board instead of power-hungry AI modules, which extends runtime to six to eight hours. Force control does not require expensive six-axis sensors and instead measures the current from bus servos; gripper fingers are 3D-printed from flexible TPU. The SDK is open under Apache 2.0 license, the data pipeline is based on Hugging Face infrastructure, and a marketplace for skills is planned.
At 1688 US dollars, the A3 undercuts every comparable dual-arm mobile manipulator by a significant margin. The fact that assembly takes place in San Francisco is no coincidence: since the US Federal Communications Commission expanded its critical vendor list to mobile robotics in July 2026, country of origin has become a sales argument. One must be honest about maturity. The perception pipeline does not yet run completely on real hardware, and autonomous navigation has not been demonstrated outside simulation. The A3 is today a developer platform, not a finished household helper.
NORI A3
Wheeled dual-arm robot · 19 DOF · USD 1688
L2 (Nori Bot)
Predecessor · 17 DOF · Firmware frozen
Participation in the Y Combinator summer 2026 cohort.
Introduction of the NORI A3 in August; delivery announced for fall 2026.
Start of second production batch in early September; assembly in San Francisco.
No distribution partner known in Switzerland. The manufacturer has not yet provided information about shipping outside the USA; orders are placed through their own website.