This $30M startup built a dog crate-sized robot factory that learns by watching humans

While many robotics companies are building human-sized robots, or working to automate entire factories, MicroFactory is instead trying to think big by building small.  

San Francisco-based MicroFactory built a general-purpose, tabletop manufacturing kit that’s about the size of my Siberian Husky’s dog crate. This compact factory includes two robotic arms and can be trained by human demonstration, as well as through AI.  

“General purpose robots are good, but it’s not necessary [to] be humanoid,” said Igor Kulakov, the co-founder and CEO of MicroFactory, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We decided to design robots from scratch that will still be general purpose but not in human shape, and this way, it can be done much simpler, much easier, in hardware and on the AI side.” 

Rather than selling individual robotic arms, MicroFactory’s system comes as an enclosed but transparent workstation, allowing users to watch the manufacturing process in real time. The compact factory-in-a-box is designed for precision tasks like circuit board assembly, component soldering, and cable routing. Users can train the robots by physically guiding the arms through complex motions — a hands-on approach that Kulakov says works faster than traditional AI programming for intricate manufacturing sequences.

“Usually it takes couple hours, but in this way, the robot much better understands what it should do,” Kulakov said. “When you hire people, we still need to spend time, like a week or something, to instruct these people to then supervise their work. A manufacturing company, they already have this time and resources to spend, and it will be much easier to train a model and to make it work in this way.” 

Kulakov’s experience with traditional manufacturing helped spark the idea behind MicroFactory.  

He and his co-founder, Viktor Petrenko, used to run bitLighter, a manufacturing business that made portable lighting equipment for photographers. Kulakov said it was difficult to train new employees on how to complete the manufacturing process correctly. When advancements in AI made it seem possible to automate this type of work, they decided to jump on the opportunity.  

Kulakov and Petrenko launched MicroFactory in 2024. It took them about five months to build their prototype. Now the company has hundreds of preorders from customers looking to use the machines for various applications, including assembling electronics and even processing snails to be shipped to France for escargot.  

MicroFactory just raised a $1.5 million pre-seed funding round that included investors like executives from the AI company Hugging Face and investor-entrepreneur Naval Ravikant. The round values the young startup at a $30 million post-money valuation.  

Kulakov said the company plans to use the funding to build and ship out its units. The company is currently converting its prototype into a commercial product that it hopes to begin shipping in about two months.  

The company also plans to make some hires and continue improving its technology, including the AI models running under the hood.  

“Our growth is related to building hardware, so we set the goal to increase it 10x each year,” Kulakov said. “In the first year, we want to produce 1,000 robots, [about] three per day, and we have the capability to do this. Then, [we want to] make more and more productions.”