San Francisco startup Origin has emerged from stealth with $20 million in total funding to build general-purpose robots for interior construction. The round was co-led by Accel and Zacua Ventures, with backing from Unilazer Ventures, Schema Ventures, Z21, ISAI and Imad Ventures, plus angel investors from Anduril, Skild AI, 1X and Tesla.
The funding will go toward deploying OG-1, the company’s flagship robot, and building out its fleet. It will also support large-scale pilots with customers in the United States and Europe, including two of the largest drywall finishing contractors in the US, with further pilots scheduled in Germany, Sweden, France and Saudi Arabia.
OG-1 is designed to handle several interior trades on a single platform. It can work long shifts and take on demanding jobs such as targeted spraying and finishing high walls, as well as tricky areas like corners, pillars, soffits and edges. Wall finishing and painting are the starting trades, but Origin says its ambition is to automate the full range of interior work so contractors can build faster with consistent quality.
The bet is that construction, an industry losing skilled tradespeople faster than it can train replacements, is ready for robots built for the job site rather than the lab. Physical AI is moving quickly, and open robotics work shared through platforms such as Hugging Face shows how fast the field is evolving. Multimodal models such as Gemini, which can interpret images and spatial scenes, point to the kind of perception these machines will rely on.
Source: Evertiq
