Familiar

Not announcedNo price or pre-order yet. Colin Angle has said a Familiar should cost about what a pet costs per month, roughly $50–100 (Forbes, May 2026), which suggests a subscription model (unconfirmed). The company has raised about $30M (estimate, Dealroom and PitchBook).

Announced onlyRoomba foundersNot yet for saleFurry

Not releasedShipping: Waitlist (2027 target). Not for sale. The official site offers a waitlist only, and the company has said the first Familiars ship in 2027. Familiar Machines & Magic ↗

Familiar Machines & Magic ↗Robotics 24/7 (unveiling) ↗Forbes ↗

Overview

A furry four-legged companion from Familiar Machines & Magic, the Woburn, Massachusetts startup founded in 2024 by iRobot co-founder Colin Angle with former iRobot executives Chris Jones and Ira Renfrew. Shown at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything conference on May 4, 2026, it looks deliberately unlike a real dog or cat, somewhere between a bear and an owl, so it is not compared with a live pet. Its 23 joints, touch-sensing coat, cameras and microphones feed an on-device model that reads expressions, tone and body language and answers with chirps, purrs and posture instead of speech, with data kept on the robot. The company says it is still raising money and that the first units will not ship until 2027, so this is a waitlist, not a product.

Specifications

Category	Quadrupeds · Real dogs for the home
Released	2026
Country	USA
Availability	Announced only
Programmability	No programmability
Built-in autonomy	Reactive · Responds to its surroundings without a map, such as avoiding obstacles or following a person
LLM support	Official LLM tools · A custom small multimodal AI model runs on the robot and combines vision, audio, language and memory for social reasoning. It does not hold conversations, since it answers with animal-like sounds and body language rather than speech. Robotics 24/7 ↗
MuJoCo simulation	None found · Nothing found.
NVIDIA Isaac simulation	None found · Nothing found.
Gazebo simulation	None found · Nothing found.
Best for	Ages 8+ (estimated)
Vision sensors	Camera
Actuators	Unknown
Audio	Microphone, Speaker
Compute type	Proprietary / undisclosed
Compute	Custom small multimodal AI model running on the device (hardware not named)
Weight	Not published, about the size of a small dog
Speed	Not published
DOF	23 motorized joints
Sensors	Touch-sensitive coat, vision system, microphone array
SDK	None announced

Timeline

Dec 2024 (est.)UpdateSeries A of about $15M for the then-stealth startup Dealroom ↗
May 4, 2026AnnouncedFamiliar unveiled at the WSJ Future of Everything conference as the company left stealth Robotics 24/7 ↗
2027 (est.)Estimated deliveryFirst units expected to ship Global Brands Magazine ↗