Prosper Robotics
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Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
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11 citations
Review status
Source-backed
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v1 · 1,817 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Prosper Robotics is a London-based robotics startup founded in 2021 by Shariq Hashme, a former OpenAI and Scale AI employee, that is developing a general-purpose home robot called Alfie. Alfie is a wheeled (not bipedal) mobile manipulator with two arms, gripper "hands," and a sensor head, intended to perform indoor domestic chores such as cleaning surfaces and floors, rinsing and loading a dishwasher, and sorting and folding laundry. The company's central bet is that a useful household robot does not have to be fully autonomous at launch: early units lean heavily on human teleoperation, with remote operators completing tasks the robot cannot yet do on its own and generating the demonstration data needed to automate those tasks over time.[1][2][3] As of mid-2026, Prosper Robotics remains an early-stage company. Alfie is a prototype that has not shipped as a commercial product, and most of the figures around price, timeline, and capability are company targets rather than delivered results.[3][4][5]
The company should not be confused with Prosper Marketplace, the unrelated San Francisco peer-to-peer lending and personal-finance company that operates at prosper.com.
Prosper Robotics Ltd was incorporated in England on February 4, 2021, with company number 13180130, and is registered to an address in Sevenoaks, Kent. Its filed business activities span data processing, engineering, research and experimental development, and general cleaning of buildings.[6] The company is small. Coverage from 2023 to 2024 described a team of roughly eight people, plus remote teleoperators and a hardware "field lab" in Shenzhen, China, where the team works on the supply chain and 3D-prints test parts.[1][3][5]
Shariq Hashme is Prosper Robotics' founder and chief executive. According to Sifted and MIT Technology Review, he worked at OpenAI for several months in 2017, contributing to the company's Dota-playing bot project, then spent time at the data-labeling company Scale AI, where he was an early employee, before founding Prosper in 2021.[1][3] His personal website describes contributing to OpenAI's "Dota 1v1 bot" and helping build Scale AI.[7]
Hashme's tenure at Scale AI ended in a criminal case that several outlets have reported in connection with Prosper. In May 2019, Scale AI discovered that its internal network had been compromised and roughly $40,000 drained from company accounts; the FBI traced the intrusion to Hashme, in part because he had used his real phone number to verify a PayPal account tied to the scheme, with related bank accounts accessed from IP addresses in Thailand.[8] He was arrested at San Francisco International Airport in August 2019. A computer-fraud charge was dropped and he pleaded guilty to wire fraud. MIT Technology Review, in a December 2024 feature, reported that Hashme withdrew approximately $56,000 in unauthorized payments, pleaded guilty in October 2019, and was sentenced in February 2020 to three months in federal prison, which he served.[3][8] A US Department of Justice press release titled "Man Sentenced for Stealing from PayPal Accounts in Wire Fraud Scheme" corresponds to the case.[9]
Alfie is Prosper Robotics' first product, described by the company and reporters as a "robot butler" for the home and, potentially, for settings such as hotels, hospitals, and offices.[1][2][4] A firsthand account from a 2023 visit to the team described an early prototype standing about 170 cm (roughly 5 feet 6 inches) tall and weighing more than 100 kg, built as a base on wheels with two mechanical arms ending in pincer-style grippers and no legs.[5]
Prosper deliberately chose a wheeled mobile base rather than bipedal legs, citing the difficulty and instability of humanoid robot walking and the fact that most home chores happen on flat indoor floors. The robot's torso can rise and lower along a vertical column so the arms can reach both floor level and countertops, and early descriptions note features such as a retracting power cord so the unit can plug itself into a wall outlet and two emergency-stop buttons.[2][4][5] Hashme has emphasized building Alfie as a recognizable, trustworthy "character" rather than a human replica, and reporting has noted that the company brought in design help from former Pixar artist Buck Lewis (who worked on the rat character in Ratatouille) and advice from a professional butler consultant to shape Alfie's manner and presentation.[3]
A distinctive part of the design is a "toolbox" of interchangeable attachments. Each robot is meant to ship with roughly 50 to 100 tools and end-effectors that snap onto its hands, for example suction cups for awkward objects such as tricky storage-container lids and a specialized mop shaped to fit the robot rather than a human hand.[1][2][10]
In demonstrations and time-lapse videos, Alfie has been shown performing tasks such as wiping kitchen tables and surfaces, rinsing dishes and loading them into a dishwasher, taking out trash, tidying and organizing items, making beds, and handling laundry. The company has said simple food preparation, for instance assembling salads or snacks, is on the roadmap.[2][4][10] These are presented as targeted chores rather than open-ended general autonomy, consistent with the company's stage of development.
Prosper's approach pairs hardware with a human-in-the-loop operating model, a strategy related to broader work in embodied AI and robot learning. At first, much of Alfie's behavior is driven by remote human operators rather than autonomous AI. MIT Technology Review reported that operators, located primarily in the Philippines, control the robot through a controller- or VR-style interface using the robot's onboard cameras and sensors, and that on early units the AI was expected to handle only about 20 percent of tasks autonomously, with roughly 80 percent requiring remote assistance.[3] Earlier accounts described operators steering the robot essentially like a video game in virtual reality.[1][5]
The company frames this teleoperation as both a service and a data-collection engine. Each remote completion of a chore produces demonstrations the company can use to train Alfie to perform that chore on its own. Hashme has summarized the logic as needing an operator to do a given task many times before the system can take over, telling reporters that "an operator would have to do the task for the first, say, 10k times" before there is enough data to automate it.[1][2] To address obvious privacy concerns raised by streaming a household to remote workers, the company has said its operator interface blurs human faces and on-screen text, and that customers can review the robot's activity through an app with time-lapse summaries.[2][4] By 2025 the company indicated that newer units would be partially autonomous from launch rather than almost entirely teleoperated.[5]
Prosper's stated plan is to both sell Alfie outright and offer it through a rental or subscription arrangement, with an ongoing fee that covers maintenance, insurance, and the wages of the human teleoperators.[1][2][4] Reported figures have shifted over time and across outlets, and all are targets rather than confirmed retail prices.
| Item | Reported figure | Source / date |
|---|---|---|
| Early target purchase price | About 5,000 to 10,000 British pounds (roughly $6,000 to $12,000) | Sifted; Interesting Engineering, 2023[1][4] |
| Later target purchase price | About $10,000 to $15,000 per unit | MIT Technology Review, 2024[3] |
| Rental / subscription | About 400 British pounds per month | Multiple outlets[2][10] |
| Alternate subscription figure | Minimum around $5,000 to buy, plus about $500 per month | Firsthand visit account, 2023[5] |
Prosper has raised far less capital than better-funded humanoid rivals. Reporting describes the company as substantially self-funded: Hashme is said to have put in a small amount of angel money plus roughly 2 million British pounds of his own.[4] Coverage and startup databases list backers including Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, Notion co-founder Simon Last, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann.[2][11] Prosper has not announced a large priced venture round, and specific totals from databases such as Crunchbase and PitchBook were not independently confirmable for this article.
Prosper has said it established a Prosper Robotics Foundation, seeded with a majority of the company's founding equity, to address the potential impact of automation on employment. The company describes the foundation as intended to support retraining and educational initiatives that help people adapt as robotics becomes more common.[2][10] This commitment has been reported based on the company's own statements; independent documentation of the foundation's size or activities was limited at the time of writing.
As of mid-2026 Prosper Robotics had not released Alfie commercially. In 2023 Hashme said a prototype suitable for alpha testing could be ready in roughly eight months, with a market-ready version targeted in about two to three years, and that around 20 households had signed up to participate in early testing.[1][4] By 2025, reporting indicated that early Alfie units were being tested in the homes of Prosper employees and that the first purchasable robots were not expected until "sometime next year," with initial availability limited to a small number of London-area homes meeting practical constraints (for example, no stairs, and in some accounts no children or pets) so the team could perform frequent check-ups.[5] These timelines are company projections and had repeatedly moved later, which is typical for early-stage home-robotics ventures.
Prosper Robotics is one of several companies pursuing capable home robots, a field that has drawn significant attention and capital. It is frequently mentioned alongside Norway's 1X Technologies, which is developing the NEO home humanoid and likewise uses remote human operators to assist early units, and alongside US efforts such as those at Apptronik, Tesla's Optimus, and Figure AI. Prosper's wheeled, teleoperation-first, lower-cost approach contrasts with the bipedal, more heavily funded path that several of those competitors have taken. Other startups taking a comparable "wheeled mobile manipulator plus teleoperation-to-data" route include Weave Robotics and Sunday Robotics.[2][3][4]