Beyond Imagination (company)
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Last reviewed
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Beyond Imagination is a United States general-purpose humanoid robot company founded in January 2018 by the scientist and entrepreneur Dr. Harry Kloor and the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Based in the Los Angeles area (Burbank, California), the company develops a wheeled humanoid platform called Beomni, an accompanying control architecture it markets as the "Beomni AI Brain," and a manufacturing operating system named Aura. Beomni is operated primarily by a remote human pilot wearing a virtual-reality headset and gloves, with an embodied AI system that the company says progressively automates tasks the robot has been shown how to do. Beyond Imagination drew wide attention in May 2025 when it disclosed a $100 million Series B round led by Gauntlet Ventures at a reported $500 million valuation, placing it among the better-funded entrants in the crowded humanoid robot market alongside Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, and 1X Technologies.
The name "Beyond Imagination" is also used by many unrelated businesses, events, photography studios, and tour operators. This article concerns only the robotics company co-founded by Kloor and Kurzweil.
Beyond Imagination was incorporated in January 2018. Its two co-founders are Dr. Harry Kloor, who serves as Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Ray Kurzweil, who serves as Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer. Kloor is a serial entrepreneur and scientist who holds simultaneous doctorates in physics and chemistry from Purdue University and who has worked as a Hollywood writer and producer; he has also held roles such as Chief Science Officer at the XPRIZE Foundation. Kurzweil is a long-time inventor and author known for his writing on artificial intelligence and the technological singularity, and he was a director of engineering and later "Chief Futurist" at Google while involved with Beyond Imagination. According to the company, three of Kurzweil's AI patents are assigned to Beyond Imagination.
Press coverage of the company has at times described inventor Dean Kamen and motivational speaker Tony Robbins as part of the founding story, but the company's own materials list both as executive advisors rather than co-founders. The advisory roster also includes former Qualcomm chief executive Paul Jacobs and former Paramount Pictures chairman Jim Gianopulos. The two named principals on most legal and funding documents are Kloor and Kurzweil.
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Harry Kloor | Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer |
| Ray Kurzweil | Co-Founder, Chief AI Officer |
| Dean Kamen | Executive advisor |
| Tony Robbins | Executive advisor |
| Paul Jacobs | Advisory board (former Qualcomm CEO) |
| Jim Gianopulos | Advisory board (former Paramount Pictures chairman) |
The company built its first functional Beomni robot, designated Version 1.0, by January 2021, and ran a series of early pilots that year. It publicly revealed the platform (the V3 build) at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and demonstrated it later in 2022 at the Explorers Club in New York and at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh.
Beyond Imagination was largely bootstrapped in its early years. Per the company's Wefunder community-round disclosures, it raised roughly $4.2 million across two seed rounds and about $1.2 million through a SAFE note, and it ran an equity crowdfunding campaign at a stated $125 million pre-money valuation.
In May 2025, Reuters first reported that the company was in talks for a $100 million Series B, and the round was subsequently described as led solely by Gauntlet Ventures at a $500 million valuation. The company said the capital would fund deployment of its humanoid (marketed in the funding coverage as the "Beyond Bot") into factories, pharmaceutical plants, and chip-manufacturing facilities. Gauntlet Ventures co-founder Oliver Carmack framed the investment around addressing a projected global shortage of skilled labor. Counting the Series B, third-party trackers put the company's cumulative funding at roughly $105 million across about five rounds, with the Series B dated to May 20, 2025.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead / source | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed (two rounds) | 2018-2022 | ~$4.2M | Bootstrapped / angels | Per company disclosures |
| SAFE / community round | 2023 | ~$1.2M | Wefunder + investors | Stated $125M valuation |
| Series B | May 2025 | $100M | Gauntlet Ventures (sole) | Reported ~$500M valuation |
The $100M and $500M figures trace primarily to a Reuters report and the company's own statements; independent confirmation of the valuation from a regulatory filing was not publicly available at the time of writing, so both should be read as company-disclosed and press-reported rather than audited.
Beomni is a general-purpose humanoid built as a human-like upper body, with an articulated head, two arms, and dexterous hands featuring opposable thumbs, mounted on a four-wheel mobile base rather than legs. Public descriptions credit each arm with the ability to lift roughly 35 pounds (about 16 kilograms) while still performing delicate manipulation such as pinching salt, turning a door handle, or opening a bottle. The wheeled base is designed to traverse uneven terrain including mud, sand, and snow, and the robot runs on a rechargeable battery rated for roughly four hours of operation. The company has shown taller and more capable iterations over time, branding later generations as the "Beyond Mark" series; the platform is variously referred to in coverage as "Beomni" and "Beyond Bot."
Unlike fully autonomous designs, Beomni is fundamentally a teleoperated robot: a remote pilot wears a VR headset and gloves, sees through the robot's stereo cameras, hears through it via 3D audio, and feels contact through haptic feedback in the gloves. The company frames this human-in-the-loop model both as a way to perform useful work immediately and as the data-collection mechanism that trains the robot's autonomy over time.
The control software is marketed as the "Beomni AI Brain." Beyond Imagination describes it as an architecture modeled on the multi-lobe structure of the human brain, in which separate "lobes" each handle a specific skill or set of skills. The company presents this compartmentalization as both an engineering choice and a safety stance: because each lobe is trained narrowly on tasks, executives argue the system cannot generalize into autonomous, conscious behavior. Kloor has said the company is "teaching the robot to do tasks" rather than "gaining consciousness," and a company production executive contrasted the approach with building "an AI that knows everything." On a per-task basis, the company says each skill can mature from teleoperated assistance to semi-autonomous and eventually fully autonomous execution.
More recent company materials describe the brain under the name Arcana, characterized as an "LLM-free" synthetic-brain architecture for perception, decision-making, and coordination, distinguishing it from approaches built around a large language model. The company also markets "Expert Minds" (also styled "Experts Mind"), described as modular, job-specific skill packages for roles such as chemical handling, bioreactor operation, surgical preparation, or warehouse logistics, and a "Hive Mind" capability under which robots upload new skills learned in the field to a shared cloud memory so the rest of the fleet can use them. These claims come largely from the company; independent technical evaluation of the architecture is limited.
Aura is a software layer the company describes as a universal operating system for intelligent manufacturing. Beyond Imagination expands the name as "Adaptive Unified Robotic/Human Administrator" and frames Aura as a coordination layer meant to let humans, Beyond's robots, and existing legacy machines work together across an entire facility rather than just controlling a single robot.
Beyond Imagination has run a series of pilots and announced partnerships, several of them memoranda of understanding or framework agreements rather than completed deployments. Notable items include:
| Date | Counterparty / pilot | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Ghost Kitchen pilot | Early food-preparation testing |
| Oct-Nov 2021 | TRU PACE (Lafayette, Colorado) | Eldercare pilot with physician David Wensel: temperature checks, delivery, social interaction |
| 2022 | GelSight | Pilot pairing GelSight tactile sensing with the robot's telepresence, including airline ground inspection |
| Aug 2023 | Dreamtech (South Korea) | Manufacturing MOU to mass-produce the humanoids; with Cobotic Surgical Inc. (CSI), targeting the medical perioperative (surgical) market first |
| 2023 | SELF Labs | Agreement to provide at least 1,000 humanoid robots for agricultural "grow boxes" |
| 2023 | Surgical assistant pilot | Operating-room assistance trials |
| Jun 2024 | Scorpius Holdings | Partnership to deploy autonomous AI-powered humanoids in US biomanufacturing |
| 2024 | Lab pilot | Laboratory-task testing |
The company has also said NASA selected Beomni for space-mission testing, and it has cited dual-PhD-level safety framing in its public statements. On order sizes, executives have stated an aim to produce thousands of robots over a five-year horizon (Kloor cited a goal of 10,000 units controlled by Expert Minds in a 2023 statement), while the publicly named SELF Labs commitment is for at least 1,000 units. The company recorded its first product revenue in April 2024 according to its own milestones.
Beyond Imagination sits inside a fast-moving wave of humanoid robot startups competing to put general-purpose machines into factories, warehouses, and care settings. Compared with peers such as Figure AI, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, and 1X Technologies, Beyond's distinguishing choices are its wheeled (rather than bipedal) base, its explicit reliance on human VR teleoperation as both a product and a data engine, and its "lobe"-based, deliberately non-LLM brain framing. Its high public profile owes much to the involvement of Kurzweil, whose name anchored most 2025 funding coverage; business press at times framed the company as a would-be rival to Elon Musk's Optimus program.
Coverage has also noted the gap between the company's ambitious claims and what has been independently demonstrated. Much of the detail about the AI brain, the Hive Mind learning system, and the Aura operating system originates with the company rather than with third-party testing, and several headline partnerships are early-stage agreements. The $500 million valuation and $100 million round, while widely reported, rest substantially on a single Reuters report and the company's own statements.