While many robotic companies are building human-sized robots or working to automate the entire factory, microfactors are trying to think big by building smaller instead.
San Francisco-based Microfactory has built a general purpose tabletop manufacturing kit, the size of a Siberian Husky dog frame. This compact factory includes two robotic arms that can be trained through AI through human demonstrations.
“General-purpose robots are great, but they don’t have to be humanoids,” Igor Kulakov, co-founder and CEO of Microfactory, said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We decided to design a robot from scratch, but that’s not an overall purpose, but not a human form. This way, it’s much easier and much easier on the hardware and AI side.”
Rather than selling individual robotic arms, Microfactory’s systems are offered as enclosed but transparent workstations, allowing users to view the manufacturing process in real time. Compact Factory Inbox is designed for precision tasks such as circuit board assembly, component soldering, and cable routing. Users can train the robot by physically guiding their arms through complex movements. This is a practical approach Kulakov says it works faster than traditional AI programming in complex manufacturing sequences.
“It usually takes several hours, but in this way the robot knows much better what it should do,” Krakov said. “When you hire people, we still need to spend time like a week or something. You need to instruct these people to oversee the work. They are manufacturing companies already have this time and resources.
Kulakov’s traditional manufacturing experience helped to inspire the ideas behind Microfactory.
He and his co-founder Viktor Petrenko ran Bitlighter, a manufacturing company that produced portable lighting equipment for photographers. Kulakov said it is difficult to train new employees on how to properly complete the manufacturing process. When advances in AI made it possible to automate this type of work, they decided to jump on the opportunity.
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Kulakov and Petrenko launched Microfactory in 2024. It took about five months to build the prototype. Currently, the company has hundreds of pre-orders from customers looking to use the machine for a variety of applications, including assembling electronic equipment shipped to France for Escargot and machining snails.
Microfactory has raised a $1.5 million pre-seed funding round that includes investors like AI companies hugging them in the face and embracing the investor’s departure navy Ravikant. The round is valuing young startups with a post-money rating of $30 million.
Kulakov said the company plans to use its funds to build and ship units. The company is currently converting its prototype into a commercial product and hopes to start shipping in about two months.
The company also plans to continue to improve its technology, including AI models running under the hood.
“Because our growth is related to building hardware, we have set a goal of increasing it tenfold each year,” Kulakov said. “In the first year, we want to produce 1,000 robots (about three) per day. We have the ability to do this. After that, (we) create more and more pieces.”
