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Kyber Labs

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Kyber Labs is a United States robotics startup, based in Brooklyn, New York, that builds a low-cost, high-speed, backdrivable anthropomorphic dexterous robotic hand for artificial-intelligence-driven manipulation. Founded in 2022 by alumni of SpaceX and the electric-motorcycle maker Tarform, the company spent several years in relative stealth before breaking cover in November 2025 with a widely shared video of a blue, skeletal five-fingered hand threading a nut onto a bolt at a speed that rivals human reflex. Kyber's guiding premise is that most factory and laboratory work needs human-level manual dexterity but not a walking robot: co-founder Tyler Habowski has described the venture as "the anti-humanoid humanoid robot company."[1][4][5] Its tendon-driven hand is engineered to be "backdrivable" and "torque transparent," meaning that external forces can move its joints freely and it senses contact through the electrical current in its motors rather than through delicate fingertip touch sensors.[4][7]

At a glance

FieldDetail
Founded2022; emerged from stealth November 2025
HeadquartersBrooklyn, New York, United States
FoundersTyler Habowski and Yonatan Robbins
IndustryRobotics; dexterous manipulation; embodied AI
ProductBackdrivable, tendon-driven anthropomorphic robotic hand (20 degrees of freedom) plus a bimanual manipulation platform
Websitekyberlabs.ai

Company and founders

Kyber Labs was incorporated in 2022 and operates out of Brooklyn, New York.[1][12][14][16] The company describes itself as building "robots designed for AI," meaning hardware and software co-developed from the ground up so that machine-learning systems, rather than hand-tuned scripts, can drive fine manipulation. Its stated aim is to close what it calls "a huge gap in the capability of current robotics systems," the mismatch between robots that can move around a room and robots that can actually manipulate small objects with human-like care.[1]

The company was co-founded by Tyler Habowski and Yonatan Robbins, whose backgrounds are unusual for a robotic-hand startup.[4][5] Habowski is a former SpaceX engineer who worked on flight-reusability systems for the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship launch vehicles, and later worked as a machine-learning engineer at the metal-forming startup Machina Labs.[1][4] Robbins is an industrial designer with more than a decade of experience spanning surgical devices and film work, and he led mechanical design at Tarform, a Brooklyn-based electric-motorcycle maker known for unconventional manufacturing.[1][12] The pairing of an aerospace-and-machine-learning engineer with a hardware-focused industrial designer maps directly onto Kyber's "hardware plus AI" pitch.

Early team members include Julian Viereck, a robotics research scientist who holds a PhD in robotic control from New York University and previously worked in machine-learning engineering at Amazon, with earlier stints connected to Google X and CERN, and Lizzie Ayton, a Columbia-trained mechanical engineer with biotech and robotics experience.[1][3] Some company directories list Viereck alongside the two founders, but Kyber's own site presents Habowski and Robbins as the co-founders and Viereck as a research scientist.[1][12]

The Kyber hand

Kyber's core product is an anthropomorphic five-fingered hand, shown publicly in a bright blue, skeletal, mostly 3D-printed form.[4][6] Its central design goals are backdrivability, mechanical compliance, and low cost, in service of AI-based control rather than pre-programmed motion.[1][4]

Degrees of freedom and tendon drive

The hand has 20 actuated degrees of freedom, with, in Kyber's own description, "no under actuated joints or physical springs."[7] Motion is transmitted by roughly 40 full tendons that run back to a bank of custom, frameless brushless DC motors packed into the forearm rather than inside the hand itself; the company has described the current design as using about 20 motors, one per degree of freedom, so that every joint is directly driven.[5][6] Placing the motors in the forearm keeps the fingers slim and lets the motors share a common metal structure that acts as a heat sink, which Habowski has argued allows continuous operation without thermal throttling: "You can share heat across a lot of motors. It's a much more effective way to do it."[5] Full actuation with paired tendons, instead of the springs or underactuated linkages common in cheaper hands, is what lets Kyber claim to always know the exact pose of the hand. As Habowski put it, "We wanted to be able to know the full position of the hand at all points so that there was no uncertainty."[5]

Kyber's public messaging around actuation has shifted over time, which is worth flagging. Legal filings from its 2023 pre-seed round described the company as using "novel artificial muscle technology," and some 2025 press accounts characterized its actuators as artificial-muscle fibers built from a coil-and-magnet arrangement.[9][10] The architecture the founders detailed publicly in late 2025, and the one visible in the demonstration hardware, is the tendon-and-forearm-motor system described above.[5][6]

Backdrivability, torque transparency, and sensing

The two properties Kyber emphasizes most, backdrivability and torque transparency, are closely linked. A backdrivable actuator has low enough friction and inertia that an outside push moves the motor: if you press on the finger, it gives way, and the control system registers the movement. Torque transparency means the software can accurately estimate the force at each joint from the motor's drive current, without a separate force or torque sensor. As Kyber describes it, the system "can accurately infer the torque from the drive current" and does so "fast across all 20 actuated DoF."[7] Combined, these let the hand "feel the world through its own drive currents," so it can comply with contact instead of crushing it.[9]

In demonstrations, Kyber says the hand stops the instant a finger meets even a feather's resistance, and that the same compliance lets it absorb a hammer blow by flexing rather than breaking, all using motor-current sensing alone.[4][5] The demonstrated hand carries no fingertip tactile sensors; the company says a proprietary, "low cost, high density" fingertip tactile sensor is in development for a future iteration, along with a move from 3D-printed parts to anodized aluminum.[2][6]

Speed, cost, and published specs

The demonstration that drew attention showed the hand spinning a nut down a bolt at high speed. Kyber stresses that the footage is unedited: "Our hand rotates a nut on a bolt at super high speed, fully in real time with no edits."[4] The point, the company says, is not raw speed but reliability for learning systems: because the hand is backdrivable and torque transparent, "it adapts naturally to the nut" as it threads.[4]

On price, Kyber's target is a scaled unit cost "in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands," achieved through low-cost materials and the forearm-motor layout.[2][4] That figure is a design goal for volume production rather than a current retail price. The third-party specification tracker Humanoid.guide lists the hand as human-hand-sized with a grip strength of about 6 kg and an indicative price near 1,000 US dollars, but these are aggregator estimates, not figures published by Kyber, and the company has not officially released grip-force, payload, or weight numbers.[13]

Strategy: the "anti-humanoid" thesis

Kyber's positioning is deliberately contrarian. Despite building an anthropomorphic hand, Habowski calls Kyber "the anti-humanoid humanoid robot company," arguing that the industry is "over-indexing on general-purpose walking robots for tasks that don't require them."[5] His reasoning, drawing on a background in reusable rockets, is that a bipedal, general-purpose humanoid robot is an expensive way to accomplish work that is really about the hands. Kyber's framing is that "the true value of humanoid robots lies in their hands and what they can do with them in the world. Whether fixed at a workstation, on a rail, on wheels, or on legs, dexterous manipulation is a key unlock."[2]

Rather than a walking robot, Kyber is building what it calls a modular manipulation platform: capable hands mounted on whatever base a task needs, such as a simple arm, a rail, or a wheeled bimanual cart. Habowski frames the software as agnostic to the base: "The software doesn't really care how the hand is moving around, just that it can get to the place in space that it needs."[5] The early target applications are kitting, assembly, and machine tending, in what the company calls "high-mix, low-volume industrial tasks," the sort of dexterous work grippers cannot do.[2][5] Kyber positions this as a "pragmatic stepwise approach" that stops short of the "put them in your home" general-purpose robots pursued elsewhere.[2] To seed adoption and gather manipulation data for training, the company has said it plans to release 50 hands for free to researchers.[5]

In March 2026, Kyber extended the thesis from factory fasteners to the laboratory, debuting an autonomous "wet lab" assistant developed in collaboration with a clinical pathology lab at Emory University.[6] The bimanual system, designed to be wheeled up to an existing workbench, performed a sequence of real bench tasks including pipetting, unscrewing micro-centrifuge caps, and operating a vortex mixer, executed in a single take with no teleoperation.[6][15] Kyber says the underlying control uses a "primitive-based" architecture that breaks a job into discrete, deterministic actions strung together by a higher-level agent, an approach it argues is auditable, interpretable, and light enough to run on-device without relying on a large language model.[6] The company frames the target market as clinical pathology labs facing labor shortages and sample backlogs, with a near-term goal of moving from demonstrations to a pilot that runs real patient samples.[6]

Funding and reception

Kyber Labs raised a pre-seed round that was announced on August 17, 2023, led by Cortical Ventures, with legal work on the round handled by Foley & Lardner LLP.[10][11] Kyber's own investor list names Cortical Ventures, Starburst Ventures, Elliptic Ventures, Earthrise Ventures, Fundomo, and Heuristic Capital; the veteran roboticist and Y Combinator alumnus Trevor Blackwell later joined as an angel investor, an addition Kyber announced in early 2024.[1] The exact size of the round was not officially disclosed; startup trackers report figures ranging from roughly 1.2 million to 1.7 million US dollars for the round, while one aggregator lists a higher cumulative total of about 6.7 million US dollars raised, so any precise figure should be treated as unconfirmed.[11][12] The participation of Starburst, an aerospace-and-defense-focused investor, and of a former SpaceX engineer as co-founder gives the cap table an aerospace flavor.

Public attention came from the demonstration videos rather than from fundraising. Kyber posted its nut-and-bolt clip on X in November 2025, and it spread quickly; according to Humanoids Daily, the launch video drew more than 100,000 views within a week.[5] The demo and the "anti-humanoid" framing were picked up by trade and enthusiast outlets including Interesting Engineering, Electronics360, and Humanoids Daily, and the founders appeared on the "Over the Horizon" robotics podcast for a technical deep dive.[4][5][7][8] Coverage has generally treated Kyber as an intriguing early-stage bet on cheap dexterity rather than a proven product.

Positioning versus other dexterous-hand makers

Kyber occupies a specific niche within the broader field of humanoid robot hands: a low-cost, tendon-driven, backdrivable hand explicitly designed as a data-collection and control substrate for reinforcement learning and other AI methods. That distinguishes it from several established categories.

Research-grade tendon hands such as the Shadow Dexterous Hand and the Allegro Hand already offer high degrees of freedom and, in Shadow's case, tendon drive, but they are priced for well-funded laboratories, often in the tens of thousands of dollars. Kyber's differentiator is cost: its stated ambition is to bring a comparably dexterous, backdrivable hand toward the hundreds-of-dollars range so that manipulation research and deployment are not gated by hardware price.[2][4] In this respect it sits alongside a newer wave of affordable, tendon-driven hands aimed at researchers, such as the open-source ORCA Hand and the emerging platform from Tetheria, all of which share the premise that cheap, compliant hands are what unlock learning-based manipulation.

Kyber also differs from artificial-muscle approaches such as those of Clone Robotics, which pursue biologically inspired actuators, and from the large humanoid programs whose hands are one subsystem of a full bipedal robot. Its most durable point of contrast is philosophical: where OpenAI's Dactyl and the humanoid makers treat a general-purpose robot as the goal, Kyber treats the hand plus a minimal base as sufficient for a large share of real work, and it markets the hand itself, not a walking robot, as the product.

Limitations and open questions

Kyber Labs is early stage, and much about it remains unproven in public. The hand shown to date is a 3D-printed prototype, and the company's most striking claims, human-reflex speed, feather-light contact sensitivity, and durability under a hammer strike, come from its own demonstrations and have not been independently benchmarked or published in peer-reviewed work.[4][5] The headline "hundreds of dollars" cost is a target for volume production, not a shipping price, and no publicly available, third-party-reviewed product yet exists; figures such as a 6 kg grip and a roughly 1,000-dollar price come from a spec aggregator rather than from Kyber.[13] The demonstrated hand still lacks the fingertip tactile sensor that Kyber says will be central to future dexterity.[6]

The funding picture is likewise modest and only partly disclosed: the pre-seed total is not officially confirmed, and the company had not, as of mid-2026, announced a larger institutional round.[11][12] The laboratory-automation direction, while concrete, is at the demonstration stage; Kyber's own framing describes moving to a pilot on real patient samples as a future step rather than a current deployment.[6] As with many robotics startups, the gap between an eye-catching video and a reliable, priced, shipping manipulator is the central question that Kyber has yet to publicly resolve.

See also

References

  1. Kyber Labs, official website. https://kyberlabs.ai/ ↩
  2. Kyber Labs, "FAQ." https://kyberlabs.ai/faq ↩
  3. Kyber Labs, "Demos." https://kyberlabs.ai/demos ↩
  4. Humanoids Daily, "Kyber Labs Emerges with a High-Speed, 'Backdrivable' Robotic Hand." https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/kyber-labs-emerges-with-a-high-speed-backdrivable-robotic-hand ↩
  5. Humanoids Daily, "Kyber Labs Founders Crash the 'Over the Horizon' Podcast for a Technical Deep Dive." https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/kyber-labs-founders-crash-the-over-the-horizon-podcast-for-a-technical-deep-dive ↩
  6. Humanoids Daily, "From Nuts to Needles: Kyber Labs Debuts Autonomous Wet Lab Assistant." https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/from-nuts-to-needles-kyber-labs-debuts-autonomous-wet-lab-assistant ↩
  7. Interesting Engineering, "Video: 'Backdrivable' robot hand spins nut on bolt at incredible speed" (November 26, 2025). https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/backdrivable-robotic-hand-rotates-nut-bolt ↩
  8. Electronics360 (GlobalSpec), "Watch as a backdrivable robot hand rapidly threads a nut onto a bolt." https://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/23111/watch-as-a-backdrivable-robot-hand-rapidly-threads-a-nut-onto-a-bolt ↩
  9. Mike Kalil, "Kyber Labs' Super-Fast Robotic Hand Grabs Attention." https://mikekalil.com/blog/kyber-labs-robotic-hand/ ↩
  10. Foley Ignite, "Foley Represents Cortical Ventures in Pre-Seed Round for Kyber Labs." https://foleyignite.com/foley-represents-cortical-ventures-in-pre-seed-round-for-kyber-labs/ ↩
  11. StartupHub.ai, "Kyber Labs Pre-Seed." https://www.startuphub.ai/investment_rounds/kyber-labs-pre-seed/ ↩
  12. Deep Tech Week, "Kyber Labs" organization profile. https://www.deep-tech-week.com/organizations/kyber-labs ↩
  13. Humanoid.guide, "Kyber Labs Robot Hand." https://humanoid.guide/product/kyber-labs-hand/ ↩
  14. CB Insights, "Kyber Labs" company profile. https://www.cbinsights.com/company/kyber-labs ↩
  15. Kyber Labs, "Kyber Labs Just Ran a Real Pathology Lab Workflow" (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzbrQLlsvM4 ↩
  16. Kyber Labs, LinkedIn company page. https://www.linkedin.com/company/kyber-labs ↩

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