Standard Bots
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Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
Sources
17 citations
Review status
Source-backed
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v1 · 2,022 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Standard Bots is an American robotics company that designs and builds AI-powered six-axis robotic arms for factory automation. Headquartered in Glen Cove, New York, on Long Island, the company was started in 2017 by Evan Beard and David Golden, and it pitches itself as one of the few firms manufacturing collaborative robot arms at scale in the United States. Its flagship product, originally branded RO1 and now marketed as Core, is a 6-axis arm with an 18 kg payload and a 1.3 m reach that starts at $37,000, roughly half the typical price of comparable cobots, and is programmed through a no-code touchscreen interface backed by in-house AI. Standard Bots raised a $63 million funding haul in July 2024 (anchored by a $39 million Series B led by General Catalyst, with the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Samsung Next participating), and it counts NASA and bearings maker Timken among its early customers.
Standard Bots is an industrial robot arm maker, not a humanoid company. It should not be confused with Standard Robots, a separate Chinese maker of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for warehouses, which is an unrelated business.
Evan Beard, the company's chief executive, began building Standard Bots in 2017 from his apartment in New York City, funding the earliest work with personal savings alongside co-founder David Golden. Sources differ on a formal incorporation year, but multiple profiles date the start of the robotics effort to 2017.
Beard is a serial entrepreneur. After graduating from Duke University, he co-founded the contact-management startup Etacts, which went through Y Combinator and was acquired by Salesforce in 2010. He later co-founded A Plus, a positive-news digital media company backed by Ashton Kutcher, and was named to the Forbes "30 Under 30" media list. Golden's background is in finance and operations: he worked in investment banking and venture roles before co-founding the lending startup LeapPay (sold to Funding Circle) and the indoor-farming company Bowery Farming.
The pair set out to bridge the gap between software and hardware in robotics, with the goal of making industrial automation cheap and easy enough for small and mid-sized manufacturers to adopt. Standard Bots secured seed funding just before the COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2020, which let it move into an 8,500-square-foot factory in Glen Cove, New York. Itai Tsiddon served as the lead seed investor and an early board member.
Standard Bots announced on July 12, 2024 that it had raised more than $63 million in total funding. The bulk of that, a $39 million Series B, was led by General Catalyst, with participation from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Samsung Next (the venture arm of Samsung Electronics). Additional backers named in the round included Lachy Groom, Quiet Capital, 468 Capital, Lightscape Partners, and Box Group. As part of the deal, Max Rimpel of General Catalyst joined the board alongside existing director Itai Tsiddon.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead / notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | early 2020 | undisclosed | Itai Tsiddon (lead) |
| Series B (within a ~$63M total) | July 12, 2024 | $39M (part of >$63M raised) | General Catalyst; Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund; Samsung Next; Lachy Groom; Quiet Capital; 468 Capital; Lightscape Partners; Box Group |
The company said it would use the money to expand its engineering team, develop next-generation robots in new sizes, and improve the proprietary software platform that makes the robots easy to operate. Some venture databases list a higher cumulative total than $63 million, reflecting later or differently classified financing, but the figures publicly confirmed in 2024 were the $39 million Series B and the more than $63 million raised overall.
In May 2025, Standard Bots used the Automate trade show in Detroit to announce a larger robot and a bigger U.S. factory. The company opened a new headquarters and production facility in Glen Cove totaling more than 16,000 square feet, roughly double the size of its previous Long Island site, with a grand opening on June 12, 2025. Standard Bots described the move as part of a strategy to vertically integrate manufacturing in the United States, eventually casting, heat-treating, milling, and powder-coating its own parts rather than relying on overseas suppliers.
CEO Evan Beard has become a public advocate for U.S. robotics policy. In November 2025 he testified before the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, arguing that the country needs a national robotics strategy to keep pace with China, which he said had installed roughly ten times as many robots as the United States in the prior year. His policy recommendations included government offtake agreements, tax credits for buyers of American-made robots, expanded workforce training, and low-cost loans for manufacturers.
Standard Bots builds 6-axis (six-jointed) collaborative robotic arms aimed at manufacturing and machine tending. As of 2026 the lineup spans two payload classes, with the original RO1 now marketed under the name Core and a larger arm called Thor.
The RO1, the company's first and flagship product, is now sold as Core. It is a 6-axis arm with an 18 kg (about 39 lb) payload and a reach of 1.3 m (1,300 mm), roughly four feet. Standard Bots quotes a repeatability of +/-0.025 mm and a linear speed of up to 3 m/s. The arm mounts on a portable base, so it does not require bolting into a concrete floor, which makes it easier to redeploy between tasks.
The headline feature is price. The RO1 starts at $37,000, which Standard Bots and trade coverage describe as roughly half the cost of comparable cobots from established vendors. The company also offers lease and pay-per-use options to lower the barrier to adoption.
| Specification | RO1 / Core | Thor |
|---|---|---|
| Type | 6-axis collaborative arm | 6-axis collaborative arm |
| Payload | 18 kg (~39 lb) | 30 kg (~66 lb) |
| Reach | 1.3 m (1,300 mm) | 2 m (2,000 mm) |
| Repeatability | +/-0.025 mm | +/-0.025 mm |
| Linear speed | up to 3 m/s | up to 4 m/s |
| Starting price | $37,000 | $49,500 |
| Status | Shipping | Launched 2025 |
At Automate 2025, Standard Bots unveiled a heavier-duty arm with a 30 kg (66.1 lb) payload and a 2 m (6.5 ft) reach, now sold as Thor. It carries the same +/-0.025 mm repeatability as the smaller model, a higher 4 m/s linear speed, and a starting price of $49,500. The company positions it for heavier tooling and larger workpieces in automotive, aerospace, and logistics applications, including welding, palletizing, and machine tending. Early reporting also referred to the model as RO2 or RO3-Max before the Thor branding settled.
Standard Bots' main selling point is that its arms can be set up by people with no robotics or coding background. The RO1 is programmed through an intuitive no-code touchscreen interface based on dragging, tapping, and "teaching" motions, which the company says cuts the time and cost of changeovers compared with traditional pre-programmed robots. For developers who want deeper control, the platform also exposes APIs, including support for custom applications built with React.
Beyond conventional programming, the robots are designed to learn by demonstration. An operator can perform a task in front of the arm's built-in wrist camera, and onboard AI software learns to replicate the motion. The arm includes a vision system that can locate and pick parts off a table and even read machine screens to check operating status, plus collision detection so it can work safely alongside people. Standard Bots runs AI models on an onboard processor and has compared the capability of its system to GPT-4-level intelligence, language that is marketing positioning rather than a benchmarked claim.
Standard Bots is developing what it calls "physical AI," a robot foundation model approach that uses transformer-based machine-learning models to let robots generalize across tasks rather than follow rigid scripts. The company has said this work is built on top of NVIDIA's Isaac platform, using Isaac Sim for simulation, data annotation, and augmentation. Co-founder David Golden has framed the shift in terms familiar to the AI industry, saying "robotics is having its ChatGPT moment."
This end-to-end, learning-based capability is the part of the roadmap most worth distinguishing from what ships today. The no-code programming, train-by-demonstration workflow, vision, and safety features are part of the shipping product. The broader generalist "end-to-end model" went through a private beta, and Standard Bots said it planned to release it to a wider audience over the course of 2025. Readers should treat the most ambitious manipulation claims as in-progress rather than fully deployed.
Standard Bots targets manufacturers, machine shops, and other small and mid-sized businesses that have historically been priced out of automation. Common use cases for the arms include CNC machine tending, welding, sanding and polishing, quality inspection and faulty-part removal, packaging, and palletizing. The company has also pointed to longer-horizon possibilities such as complex assembly and food preparation as targets for its AI roadmap.
Publicly named customers include NASA and Timken, the bearings and power-transmission manufacturer. Standard Bots says its installed base ranges from large enterprises to small shops, and it frames its mission partly around addressing labor shortages and reshoring manufacturing to the United States.
Standard Bots has drawn attention primarily for two things: aggressive pricing and U.S. manufacturing. Trade outlets such as The Robot Report and general technology press including SiliconANGLE and Bloomberg covered the 2024 funding round as a notable bet on bringing AI-driven robotics costs down and on building hardware domestically. The company is frequently cited in the context of the broader push to make cobots affordable for small manufacturers, and Beard's congressional testimony in late 2025 raised its profile in U.S. industrial-policy debates. As with many young robotics companies pursuing generalist manipulation, the gap between marketed AI capability and independently verified, deployed performance remains the main open question.