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Piggy Robotics

Humanoid robots that do your chores for the price of an iPhone!

We build humanoid robots that do your chores at iPhone prices. Just like the millions of cars generating data for self-driving, we need millions of humanoids generating real-world data for general-purpose robotics. Humanoid companies today can only manufacture hundreds a year because motors are expensive and slow to assemble. We use artificial muscles. Each muscle is just a tube wrapped in braided fibre, and the whole robot is powered by a single pump — which means we can mass-produce humanoids by the millions. Our design is built for that scale from day one and is cheap enough to enter billions of homes.
Active Founders
Richard Gong
Richard Gong
Co-founder
Dropped out of medicine at Oxford to build humanoid robots for the home.
Chenny (Qianyi) Deng
Chenny (Qianyi) Deng
Co-founder
Founder @ Piggy Robotics (YC F25) | PhD Candidate in Computer Science @ the University of Oxford | Ex-Tencent AI researcher | Founded the largest laser-tag arena in my city at age 13
Company Launches
Piggy Robotics - Humanoid robots
See original launch post

Hello! We’re Richard and Chenny, founders of Piggy Robotics. We build mass-producible humanoid robots that do your chores at iPhone prices.

Below is why our architecture is uniquely positioned to win the humanoid race:

1. We built a full-size, mass-producible humanoid robot in 2 months, complete with custom muscles, valves, and pumps for less than $1000. For comparison, other humanoid companies with hundreds of millions in cash spent years developing their actuators before touching a full prototype. We’re the most capital-efficient humanoid company, and we’re on track to catch up with incumbents that have far more capital within one year.

Piggy Robotics F25 Launch

2. Mass production must happen before autonomy. Tesla collects hundreds of thousands of hours of driving data per day from cars with basically 2 DoF. A humanoid has >50 DoF. To collect the same amount of data, you need >100K humanoid robots deployed. Existing humanoid companies can only produce a few hundred units per year. Our artificial muscles are far cheaper and simpler, meaning we can manufacture millions of humanoids and reach autonomy far sooner.

️3. Only our humanoid at iPhone prices can enter every home. A household robot cannot be a 70kg, $20k metal beast. At that price point, adoption follows car-level economics. New cars mostly cost over $20k, and the entire world buys only around 75 million per year. But at $2k, adoption shifts into phone-level territory, where the world buys over a billion smartphones every year. Only an architecture built around cheap, simple-to-produce artificial muscles can reach phone-scale manufacturing quickly and make that future possible.

Team

Richard studied Medicine at Oxford University, built AI systems for personalized cancer vaccines, and has a deep understanding of human anatomy and biomechanicsx—knowledge that is directly relevant to designing artificial muscles and full-body actuation.

Chenny trained AI models to read human motion—the foundational step for teleoperation and future autonomy—while doing her PhD in Computer Science at Oxford University. She previously worked on AI at Tencent. Fun fact: at age 13, Chenny built the largest laser-tag centre in her city.

Together, we spent a year inside factories deploying humanoid robots in real production environments.

Even though Piggy Robotics is only a few months old, we’ve already assembled a 16-engineer elite hardware & software team from Oxford University and top global robotics competitions. This combination of deep biomechanics, AI motion understanding, and hands-on factory deployment uniquely positions us to build the first truly mass-producible humanoid robot.

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Our Ask

If our mission resonates and you want to ship humanoids with us, we’d love to connect: founders@piggyrobotics.com

Previous Launches
Tesla promise robots for the price of a car. We will sell ours for the price of an iPhone.
Piggy Robotics
Founded:2024
Batch:Fall 2025
Team Size:15
Status:
Active
Primary Partner:David Lieb