CtrlK
| Pollen Robotics | |
|---|---|
| Type | Private company (acquired) |
| Industry | Robotics, Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Founders | Matthieu Lapeyre, Pierre Rouanet, Nicolas Rabault, Jonathan Grizou |
| Headquarters | Bordeaux, France |
| Key people | Matthieu Lapeyre (CEO), Pierre Rouanet (Co-founder) |
| Products | Reachy 2, Reachy 1, Reachy Mini |
| Employees | ~23 (at time of acquisition) |
| Parent | Hugging Face (since April 2025) |
| Website | pollen-robotics.com |
Pollen Robotics is a French robotics company that designs and manufactures open-source humanoid robots for research, education, and embodied AI applications. Founded in 2016 in Bordeaux, France, by former researchers from the Flowers team at Inria (the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology), the company grew out of the pioneering Poppy Project, one of the world's first fully 3D-printed open-source humanoid robots. Pollen Robotics is best known for its Reachy line of robots, which are deployed at over 100 institutions across more than 20 countries.
In April 2025, Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, integrating the company's hardware expertise with Hugging Face's LeRobot open-source robotics software platform. The acquisition marked Hugging Face's first move into selling physical robotics hardware and positioned the combined entity as a leading provider of end-to-end open-source robotics solutions.[1]
The roots of Pollen Robotics trace back to 2012, when Matthieu Lapeyre began his PhD thesis at Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest under the supervision of Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, head of the Flowers team. The Flowers laboratory (part of a joint team between Inria and ENSTA ParisTech) specialized in developmental robotics, machine learning, and the study of how embodiment and morphology influence cognition and sensorimotor learning.[2]
Lapeyre's doctoral research led to the creation of the Poppy humanoid robot in 2013: the first complete open-source, 3D-printed humanoid robot in the world. The initial development team consisted of Lapeyre handling mechanical design, Pierre Rouanet developing the software, and Jonathan Grizou working on electronics. The project was funded in part by a European Research Council (ERC) Explorer grant.[3]
Poppy was designed from the ground up to be accessible. Its parts could be manufactured using consumer-grade 3D printers, and all hardware designs, software, and documentation were released under open-source licenses. The robot featured bio-inspired morphology, including thigh structures that mimicked human leg geometry, and was built using Dynamixel servo motors. Within months of its public release, the Poppy community attracted several thousand users worldwide, spanning researchers, educators, artists, and hobbyists.[4]
The project expanded significantly through the Poppy Education initiative, which created pedagogical kits for teaching computer science and robotics in French classrooms. By mid-2018, 36 schools (primarily high schools) were participating in the program, with teachers and researchers co-creating activities and testing them directly with students. In 2019, Inria transferred stewardship of the Poppy ecosystem to Poppy Station, a multi-partner association bringing together participants from business, research, training, culture, and education.[5]
The commercial success and widespread adoption of Poppy demonstrated strong demand for accessible, open-source robotic platforms and motivated the founding team to launch a company capable of bringing more capable robots to the market.
Pollen Robotics was officially founded on May 17, 2016, in Bordeaux, France, by four co-founders: Matthieu Lapeyre (President/CEO), Pierre Rouanet (Deputy CEO), Nicolas Rabault (CEO/CTO), and Jonathan Grizou (Deputy CEO/COO). All four were former collaborators from Inria's Flowers team who had worked together on the Poppy Project.[6]
The company's stated mission was to advance "useful robotics that benefit society" by providing accessible and open-source products and applications that bring AI and robotics into daily life. From the beginning, Pollen Robotics established a set of core operating principles that distinguished it from most robotics companies: commitment to open-source technology, local manufacturing in France, environmental responsibility, and a firm policy against military applications or military funding.[7]
Jonathan Grizou departed the company in 2018 to pursue other ventures. Nicolas Rabault later left to found Luos, an open-source microservices platform for embedded systems. Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet continued to lead the company through its subsequent milestones and the eventual acquisition by Hugging Face.[8]
Pollen Robotics introduced the original Reachy robot at CES 2020 in Las Vegas. Reachy was an upper-body humanoid designed for teleoperation, human-robot interaction research, and manipulation tasks. The robot featured modular, bio-inspired arms with seven degrees of freedom each, an expressive antenna-equipped head, and an open-source software stack.
Reachy was offered in several configurations. A single-arm kit without the head started at $8,900, while a dual-arm configuration with the expressive head was priced at $16,900. The initial production batch was limited to 15 units. The robot shipped with pre-built "operational environments" for demonstrations, including playing tic-tac-toe, serving coffee, playing musical instruments, and handing out objects. These served as starting points for developers building custom applications.[9]
At CES 2021, Pollen Robotics demonstrated VR teleoperation capability for Reachy, allowing operators to control the robot remotely using consumer VR headsets such as the Meta Quest 2. The operator could see through Reachy's stereo cameras and control its arms and head in real time through natural hand and head movements. This capability attracted significant attention from research institutions studying remote operation, human-robot interaction, and computer vision.
Over the following years, approximately 100 Reachy units were deployed across 20 countries, primarily at academic and research institutions. Customers included Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University, EPFL, CNRS, CEA, Ecole Polytechnique, and Accenture. The robot's open-source design, accessible price point (relative to other research humanoids), and modular architecture made it particularly popular for university labs studying manipulation, social robotics, and embodied AI.[10]
In November 2022, Pollen Robotics competed in the finals of the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center in California. The competition, launched in 2018 by the XPRIZE Foundation with sponsorship from All Nippon Airways (ANA), challenged teams to build avatar systems capable of transporting a human's senses, actions, and presence to a remote location in real time.[11]
Out of 99 teams from around the world who initially registered, 17 finalist teams from 10 countries were selected for the final event on November 5, 2022. Pollen Robotics fielded an enhanced version of its Reachy robot equipped with an early prototype of three-finger dexterous hands, a mobile base with LiDAR, and improved teleoperation software.
The competition tasks tested the avatars across a range of capabilities: moving a lever, traversing a 25-meter obstacle course lined with boulders, weighing and manipulating canisters, using a battery-powered drill, and selecting a rock based on its texture. Pollen's avatar system achieved a perfect score of 15 out of 15 on the task sequence. However, Germany's Team NimbRo (from the University of Bonn) completed its run in approximately 5 minutes and 50 seconds, roughly half the time of Pollen's attempt, claiming the $5 million grand prize.[12]
Pollen Robotics took second place and won $2 million. Team Northeastern from Boston placed third, earning $1 million. The competition experience directly informed the design of Reachy 2, particularly in dexterous manipulation, mobile navigation, and low-latency teleoperation.
In 2023, Pollen Robotics secured a seed funding round of 2.4 million euros. The round was backed by a private investor, Bpifrance (the French public investment bank), and two banking institutions: Societe Generale and BNP Paribas Private Equity. Combined with the $2 million XPRIZE prize money, the company had over 4 million euros to invest in expanding its research and development team and accelerating the development of Reachy 2.[13]
Pollen Robotics launched Reachy 2 in October 2024, debuting the robot publicly at CES 2025 in January. Reachy 2 represented a substantial upgrade over the original, featuring the company's patented Orbita actuator system, dual 7-degree-of-freedom arms, stereo 3D vision, an optional omnidirectional mobile base, and VR teleoperation with 125-millisecond glass-to-glass latency. The robot was priced starting at approximately $70,000 USD.[14]
Reachy 2 was described by Pollen Robotics as "the first open-source humanoid robot specifically designed for embodied AI and real-world applications." Both hardware designs and the full software stack were released under open-source licenses, and the platform was integrated with ROS 2 and Hugging Face's LeRobot framework.
On April 14, 2025, Hugging Face announced the acquisition of Pollen Robotics for an undisclosed amount. The deal was Hugging Face's fifth acquisition, following earlier purchases of Gradio (a machine learning demo platform) and XetHub (a data collaboration tool). Matthieu Lapeyre, Pierre Rouanet, and approximately 20 Pollen employees joined Hugging Face, with the Pollen team continuing to operate from Bordeaux.[1]
Thomas Wolf, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Hugging Face, stated: "We believe robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI. It should be open, affordable, and private. Our vision: a future where everyone in the community, from hobbyists to enterprises, can build or use robot assistants or games, starting from open solutions instead of closed, remote controlled, hardware."[1]
Matthieu Lapeyre commented: "From the start, we built Pollen Robotics with open source at its core, driven by our belief that robots will play a profound role in our lives, serving as the interface between AI and the physical world. Hugging Face is a natural home for us to grow, as we share a common goal: putting AI and robotics in the hands of everyone."[1]
The acquisition created an end-to-end open-source robotics ecosystem combining Hugging Face's LeRobot software platform (with over 12,000 GitHub stars) and community hub with Pollen's hardware design and manufacturing capabilities.
The original Reachy robot, launched at CES 2020, was an upper-body humanoid with modular 7-DOF bio-inspired arms, an expressive head, and an open-source Python and ROS-based software stack. It was available in single-arm and dual-arm configurations, with or without the expressive head, at prices ranging from $8,900 to $16,900.
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Type | Upper-body humanoid |
| Launch | CES 2020 |
| Arm DOF | 7 per arm |
| Configurations | Single-arm, dual-arm, with/without head |
| Price range | $8,900 to $16,900 |
| Software | Python SDK, ROS |
| Units deployed | ~100 across 20+ countries |
Reachy 2, launched in October 2024, is the company's flagship product: a bimanual mobile manipulator designed for embodied AI research, teleoperation, and real-world service applications. It features the patented Orbita actuator system, dual 7-DOF arms with 3 kg payload per arm, an omnidirectional mobile base, stereo 3D vision, and VR teleoperation. Reachy 2 is priced starting at approximately $70,000.
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Type | Upper-body humanoid with optional mobile base |
| Launch | October 2024 (CES 2025 debut) |
| Height | 136 to 166 cm (adjustable) |
| Weight | 50 kg |
| Arm DOF | 7 per arm (14 total) |
| Payload | 3 kg per arm |
| Mobile base | Omnidirectional (3 omniwheels) |
| Battery | LiFePO4 24V, 35Ah (up to 10 hours) |
| Actuators | Patented Orbita 2D and 3D |
| VR latency | 125 ms glass-to-glass |
| Price | Starting at ~$70,000 USD |
| Software | Python SDK, ROS 2, LeRobot, Gazebo, MuJoCo |
Following the Hugging Face acquisition, Pollen Robotics announced Reachy Mini in mid-2025. Reachy Mini is a compact desktop robot standing 28 cm tall and weighing 1.5 kg, designed to make robotics and AI experimentation accessible to students, hobbyists, and developers. It features six degrees of freedom for head movement, 360-degree body rotation, expressive LED eyes, a wide-angle HD camera, a 4-microphone array for sound localization, and a 5W speaker.
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Type | Desktop companion robot |
| Height | 28 cm |
| Weight | 1.5 kg |
| DOF | 6 (head) + 360-degree body rotation |
| Camera | Wide-angle HD |
| Audio | 4-microphone array, 5W speaker |
| Programming | Python, JavaScript, Scratch |
| Price | $299 (Lite), $449 (Wireless with Raspberry Pi 5) |
| Open source | Full hardware CAD files, firmware, Python SDK |
| AI integration | Access to 1.7+ million models on Hugging Face Hub |
Reachy Mini Lite units were scheduled to ship in late summer 2025, with the Wireless version shipping in batches from fall 2025 through 2026.[15]
The defining mechanical innovation of Pollen Robotics is the Orbita actuator system, developed in-house and patented by the company. Orbita actuators are parallel mechanisms that enable fluid, human-like multi-axis movement. Reachy 2 uses two variants: Orbita 3D (used in neck and wrist joints, providing three degrees of freedom via three concentric motorized axes) and Orbita 2D (used in shoulder and elbow joints, providing two degrees of freedom with infinite rotation capability). The design allows internal cable routing through hollow shafts, reducing exposed wiring and improving durability.[16]
Pollen Robotics distinguishes itself through a comprehensive commitment to open source that extends across both software and hardware. The entire software stack, including the Python SDK, ROS 2 middleware, VR teleoperation application, web dashboard, and simulation environments (Gazebo and MuJoCo), is released under open-source licenses. The company also publishes complete 3D hardware models, CAD files, assembly instructions, and bill-of-materials documentation on the Hugging Face Hub. This allows researchers and developers to modify, repair, extend, and even 3D-print robot components independently.[17]
The company offers 50% discounts on its products to open-source projects and provides its services free of charge to projects focused on environmental protection.[7]
Pollen Robotics' collaboration with Hugging Face on LeRobot began in 2024, before the acquisition. LeRobot is Hugging Face's open-source library for robot learning, implementing state-of-the-art policies in PyTorch for imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and vision-language-action models.
Reachy 2 is one of the natively supported hardware platforms for LeRobot. The integration enables researchers to collect demonstration data through teleoperation, store it in the standardized LeRobotDataset format (synchronized MP4 videos for camera streams and Parquet files for state/action data), train policies using the data, deploy trained neural network policies on the robot, and share datasets and models through the Hugging Face Hub. As of 2025, the Hub hosts over 100 LeRobot repositories with robotics datasets and models.[1]
The LeRobot library was launched in May 2024, led by Remi Cadene, a former staff scientist on Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot team who joined Hugging Face in March 2024. The library grew to over 12,000 GitHub stars within its first year.[18]
Pollen Robotics has operated under a distinctive set of ethical commitments since its founding. These principles, publicly stated on the company's website, include:[7]
| Principle | Description |
|---|---|
| Open source | All technology distributed under open-source licenses; 50% discounts for open-source projects |
| Local manufacturing | Robots designed and manufactured in France |
| Environmental responsibility | Free services for environmental protection projects; commitment to durable, repairable hardware |
| Non-military policy | No military applications; rejection of military funding |
| Fair labor | Local, fair labor practices |
| Transparency | Open communication with users and community |
These values influenced the company's choice of acquisition partner. In public statements around the acquisition, both Pollen and Hugging Face leadership emphasized their shared commitment to open-source technology and democratized access to AI and robotics.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2012 | Poppy Project initiated at Inria Flowers laboratory during Matthieu Lapeyre's PhD |
| 2013 | Poppy humanoid robot publicly released as the world's first fully 3D-printed open-source humanoid |
| 2016 | Pollen Robotics founded in Bordeaux by Lapeyre, Rouanet, Rabault, and Grizou |
| 2019 | Inria transfers Poppy Project stewardship to Poppy Station association |
| 2020 | Reachy 1 launched at CES 2020 |
| 2021 | VR teleoperation capability demonstrated at CES 2021 |
| 2022 | Second place at ANA Avatar XPRIZE ($2 million prize) |
| 2023 | Secured 2.4 million euro seed funding round |
| 2024 (March) | Remi Cadene joins Hugging Face from Tesla; LeRobot development begins |
| 2024 (May) | LeRobot open-source library officially launched |
| 2024 (June) | Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face begin LeRobot collaboration on Reachy 2 |
| 2024 (October) | Reachy 2 launched |
| 2025 (January) | Reachy 2 publicly debuted at CES 2025 |
| 2025 (April) | Acquired by Hugging Face |
| 2025 (Mid-year) | Reachy Mini announced |
Pollen Robotics occupies a distinctive position in the robotics industry as one of the few companies committed to fully open-source hardware and software for humanoid robots. While many robotics firms protect their designs as proprietary intellectual property, Pollen has consistently published its mechanical designs, CAD files, and software under permissive licenses, enabling a global community of researchers and developers to build upon its work.
The company's trajectory from academic research project (the Poppy humanoid) to commercial robotics venture to acquisition by one of the world's largest open-source AI platforms illustrates a model in which open-source principles can drive both scientific contribution and commercial viability. The acquisition by Hugging Face in particular signaled growing industry interest in combining AI software platforms with physical robotics hardware to create integrated ecosystems for embodied AI research and development.
As of 2025, the combined Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face robotics division offers products spanning from the $299 Reachy Mini desktop robot to the $70,000 Reachy 2 research platform, providing entry points for students, hobbyists, and professional researchers alike. The integration with LeRobot and the Hugging Face Hub gives users access to over 1.7 million AI models, shared robotics datasets, and a growing community of open-source robotics developers.[15]