Cartwheel Robotics
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Cartwheel Robotics was an American robotics startup based in Nevada, United States, that developed AI-powered humanoid robots designed for home companionship, social interaction, and entertainment. Founded by Scott LaValley, a robotics veteran with experience at Boston Dynamics and Walt Disney Imagineering, the company operated for approximately four years before shutting down in February 2026. Cartwheel was best known for its Yogi humanoid prototype, a small bipedal robot with toddler-like proportions, and for its proprietary motion language model (MLM), a generative AI system that produced expressive, lifelike movement directly from text or voice input. The company stood apart from the broader humanoid robotics industry by focusing on consumer companionship and emotional resonance rather than industrial labor.
Cartwheel Robotics was founded by Scott LaValley after he departed Walt Disney Imagineering in 2021. The company spent its first three years operating quietly, supporting itself in part through robotics engineering services provided to corporate clients while it developed its core technology and prototype hardware. According to LaValley, this revenue-funded approach allowed the team to refine its design philosophy without prematurely committing to a single product direction.[1][2]
The early years of the company were dedicated to building hardware platforms, developing software stacks, and exploring how a humanoid robot could move and behave in ways that felt social rather than mechanical. LaValley positioned the company against what he viewed as an industry consensus that humanoids should be engineered primarily as factory workers or warehouse laborers. In an interview with The Register in September 2025, he argued that prevailing humanoid designs looked "terrifying" and "unfriendly," and that the field had been driven largely by automotive and industrial engineering sensibilities.[3]
In 2025, Cartwheel Robotics formally emerged from stealth and introduced its flagship prototype, Yogi, along with a secondary platform called Speedy. The company described itself as building "lovable" humanoid robots intended to bring "joy, warmth, and a bit of everyday magic" into the spaces people live in. Coverage by IEEE Spectrum, Interesting Engineering, and Humanoids Daily highlighted the company's contrast with peers such as Tesla, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics, all of which were targeting industrial deployments at the time.[1][4][5]
During the second half of 2025, Cartwheel released several public demonstrations of Yogi's capabilities. In late September 2025, the company shared footage of the robot taking what LaValley described as its "first steps," calling the milestone an important point in the development of full bipedal locomotion. Roughly two weeks later, on October 2, 2025, LaValley posted a video of Yogi's upper body dancing and gesturing with smooth, fluid motion, emphasizing that the movement was generated by the company's AI rather than scripted animation.[6]
In October 2025, Humanoid Global Holdings Corp., a publicly traded investment platform listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the ticker ROBO, reported on Cartwheel's progress as part of its portfolio reporting. According to the announcement, Cartwheel had initiated a seed-stage financing round to support engineering, hardware production, and continued development of its full-stack humanoid platform. The release also disclosed that the company was expanding into a new facility in Reno, Nevada, internally referred to as Oddie, with construction expected to complete in January 2026.[7]
The same announcement described preliminary discussions between Cartwheel and a North American medical institution regarding co-development and pilot programs, as well as letters of interest from several universities seeking research collaborations. Cartwheel set a near-term target of debuting a full-body walking Yogi prototype at the Humanoids Summit in Silicon Valley in December 2025.[7]
On February 6, 2026, Scott LaValley announced on LinkedIn that Cartwheel Robotics was closing its doors. According to LaValley, the seven-person team had developed the compact bipedal Yogi prototype in under a year on roughly $3 million of outside capital, but the company had not been able to secure follow-on funding sufficient to bridge the gap between its progress and its long-term commercial goals. He wrote that the team "didn't find the right capital partner" and reflected publicly on the difficulty of raising hardware capital for a consumer-focused humanoid product.[8][9]
In his shutdown statement, LaValley offered two warnings to other hardware founders. He stated that "in hardware, capital is oxygen," and added that "no money is better than the wrong money." Industry observers, including Humanoids Daily and Mike Kalil, framed the closure as part of a wider "valley of death" facing American humanoid startups, drawing comparisons with the late-2025 shutdown of K-Scale Labs, another U.S. humanoid startup that had failed to close a Series A round.[8][9]
A brief farewell statement on the official Cartwheel Robotics website characterized the company's operating period as 2021 to 2025 and described its founding principle as the belief that "robots could earn trust, express personality, and coexist naturally with people." The note suggested that while the corporate entity had ended, the ideas and research it pursued would continue to influence work in the field.[10]
On March 10, 2026, roughly one month after the shutdown announcement, it was reported that Scott LaValley had joined Google DeepMind to work on robotics and physical AI. At DeepMind, LaValley reunited with Aaron Saunders, the former chief technology officer of Boston Dynamics, who had been hired by DeepMind as vice president of hardware engineering in late 2025. LaValley described the move as "coming back to the frontier, but at a very different scale," and characterized solving robotics' hardest problems as requiring "deep AI research, serious infrastructure" and "foundational breakthroughs."[11]
Scott LaValley is an American roboticist whose career spans more than two decades of work on legged and humanoid platforms. Before founding Cartwheel Robotics, he spent nearly a decade at Boston Dynamics, where he contributed to early generations of dynamic humanoid robots, including work associated with the Atlas platform. During this period he also took part in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a multi-year competition organized by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to advance disaster-response robotics.[1][3]
Following the 2013 acquisition of Boston Dynamics by Google, LaValley remained with the company through the period of Google ownership. He later joined Walt Disney Imagineering, where he served as a principal Imagineer between 2016 and 2021. At Disney, he led the team that developed the autonomous Baby Groot animatronic and contributed to the BDX Droids project, programs that emphasized expressive, character-driven motion rather than industrial task performance.[3]
LaValley has also appeared in a popular-culture context as a former competitor on the BattleBots television series and as a guest on The Tonight Show. According to The Register, LaValley has stated that an interaction with Elon Musk during a Disney visit may have helped inspire Musk's later interest in humanoid robots, though this account is presented as LaValley's own recollection rather than a confirmed claim by Musk himself.[3][9]
Cartwheel was reportedly co-founded with LaValley's sister Samantha LaValley, who also held a leadership role at the company.[8]
The Yogi was Cartwheel Robotics' flagship humanoid robot and the central focus of the company's public identity. Yogi was designed as a small, soft, expressive bipedal humanoid intended for home, hospitality, and entertainment environments rather than industrial floors.
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Form factor | Bipedal humanoid |
| Approximate height | A little over three feet (around 90 cm) when full size; early prototype roughly 76 cm |
| Proportions | "Toddler" proportions with large head and rounded body |
| Outer materials | Medical-grade silicone and protective soft materials |
| Actuation | Precision-engineered high-torque actuators with overload protection |
| Power | Modular, swappable battery system |
| Software stack | Proprietary full-stack platform integrating custom hardware, AI models, motion systems, and software |
| Intended uses | Home companionship, hospitality, healthcare, museums, research |
| Status | Prototype, never commercially released |
Yogi's body was constructed from medical-grade silicone and protective soft materials, a deliberate design decision intended to make the robot safe and comfortable to touch. Cartwheel emphasized that the robot was designed to move and respond "in a genuinely human way," and several outlets compared its visual style with the Baymax character from the animated film Big Hero 6.[5][7]
The prototype combined natural-language interaction powered by large language models with real-time generative motion. According to public demonstrations and reporting in 2025, Yogi was capable of expressive whole-body gestures, dance-like movements, personalized gaits intended to reflect different moods, and acrobatic actions including cartwheels.[1][6]
Cartwheel built its own software stack rather than relying on the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS), a choice that LaValley said reflected the company's view of itself as "a foundational model company that has its own hardware platform." The robot was originally framed as a long-term consumer product, with LaValley estimating in 2025 that wide consumer availability could be roughly four years away. In the shorter term, Cartwheel pursued early deployments in hospitality and healthcare settings.[3][6]
Speedy was a secondary platform developed by Cartwheel as a less complex, more customizable commercial system. It was conceived as a near-term product that could ship to customers while the more ambitious Yogi remained in research and development. Cartwheel publicly stated a goal of delivering "a couple dozen variations" of Speedy to museums and science centers within roughly twelve months of its 2025 stealth exit.[1]
Speedy was intended to give Cartwheel a vehicle for generating early revenue, refining manufacturing processes, and demonstrating its motion technology in public-facing environments. As with Yogi, no Speedy units were known to have reached general commercial release before the company's closure.
Cartwheel's central technical contribution was its motion language model, abbreviated MLM, a generative AI system designed to translate text or voice input into expressive, real-time motion for a humanoid body. The MLM was developed by a team that included senior AI engineer Esteve Valls Mascaró, and was positioned by the company as a foundational model in the way that large language models are foundational for natural language.[5]
In place of pre-recorded animation clips or hand-tuned controllers, the MLM produced motion trajectories on the fly. Public demonstrations in late 2025 showed the system generating fluid upper-body dance and gesture sequences that the company described as not animated and not teleoperated. LaValley framed the goal as "endless, expressive motion," with behaviors that could vary in style and emotion based on context.[6]
Key capabilities the company associated with the MLM included:
Cartwheel framed the MLM as part of a broader belief that humanoid robotics needed an emotional and behavioral layer comparable to the language layer that LLMs provided for chat systems. The company's name itself referenced both the acrobatic capability the system was meant to enable and the playful character of the intended user experience.[1][6]
Alongside the MLM, Cartwheel developed a proprietary humanoid hardware platform. According to the October 2025 Humanoid Global update, this platform integrated custom mechanical design, high-torque actuators with overload protection, modular swappable batteries for all-day operation, and an outer shell of medical-grade silicone over protective soft materials.[7]
The combination of small size, soft outer materials, and child-like proportions was central to Cartwheel's safety case for putting humanoids in homes. Rather than relying primarily on motion planning and force sensing to keep humans safe around large industrial humanoids, the company argued that a smaller, softer, lighter robot could be physically forgiving by default, lowering the risk of injury during normal interaction.[1][5]
Cartwheel's public messaging consistently emphasized emotional connection over raw capability. LaValley described the prevailing humanoid design language as one in which robots are "built to be tools," with personalities he characterized as absent or "soulless." He argued that this approach overlooked a basic question of social acceptance: whether ordinary people would actually want such machines in their homes.[1][3]
In place of an industrial design language, Cartwheel pursued what it called "lovable" humanoids. Yogi's toddler-like proportions, soft silicone exterior, and expressive motion were each tied to this thesis. The company contrasted this approach with the broader humanoid sector's focus on payload capacity, walking speed, and factory throughput, arguing that none of those metrics were directly relevant to the kind of presence a robot would need to be welcomed into a living room.[1][3][5]
Cartwheel positioned itself as one of the few well-publicized humanoid startups whose primary stated target was the home. By contrast, much of the late-2020s humanoid industry was oriented toward warehouse, logistics, and manufacturing customers. Companies frequently mentioned alongside Cartwheel for comparison included Tesla with its Optimus program, Figure AI, Agility Robotics, and a number of other firms pursuing industrial humanoid deployments.[1][4]
The company's near-term commercial path was a service or rental model rather than direct unit sales to consumers. Initial planned deployments included museums and science centers using the Speedy platform, along with exploratory hospitality and healthcare engagements for Yogi.[1][7]
Cartwheel's emphasis on emotional connection placed it within the broader tradition of social robotics, a field that has long studied how robots can communicate, engage, and form relationships with human users. Its use of generative AI for motion connected the company to ongoing work in embodied AI, where physical robots are paired with large foundation models to produce flexible behavior. In LaValley's framing, the MLM was the bridge between language-level intelligence and physical-world expression.[5][6]
Cartwheel attracted significant attention in trade and general technology press during 2025. IEEE Spectrum profiled the company's stealth exit and its focus on social humanoids, while Interesting Engineering, The Register, Automate.org, and Humanoids Daily covered the company's design philosophy, demonstrations, and eventual closure. Coverage frequently emphasized Yogi's unusual visual style and the contrast between Cartwheel's vision and the dominant industrial framing of humanoid robotics.[1][3][4][5][6][8]
The February 2026 shutdown was widely interpreted as an indicator of the difficulty of building consumer humanoid hardware in the prevailing investment climate. Multiple commentators tied Cartwheel's closure to the broader pattern of American humanoid startups failing to close late seed or Series A funding rounds, with Cartwheel and K-Scale Labs cited as two prominent recent examples.[8][9]
The rapid transition of LaValley from running an independent humanoid startup to a senior-research role at Google DeepMind was also noted as illustrative of how talent in the humanoid space was being absorbed into well-capitalized AI laboratories. DeepMind, working alongside Aaron Saunders and other former Boston Dynamics personnel, was widely seen as one of several large institutions aggregating expertise from smaller robotics firms during this period.[11]
Although Cartwheel Robotics did not survive long enough to ship a commercial product, its public work helped sharpen a debate inside the humanoid robotics field about who humanoid robots are for and what they should look like. The company's emphasis on small, soft, character-driven humanoids stood in deliberate contrast to the larger, metal-clad industrial humanoids that dominated investment headlines, and its motion language model offered a concrete demonstration of how generative AI could be used as a behavior layer rather than only as a planning or perception layer.[1][3][6]
Cartwheel's farewell statement framed the company's contributions as ideas, prototypes, and design language that would outlast the corporate entity itself. With LaValley continuing to work on robotics and physical AI inside Google DeepMind, and with Yogi's videos preserved across IEEE Spectrum, Humanoids Daily, and other outlets, the company's body of work remained accessible to the broader research community after its closure.[10][11]