Home Robots Raise Billions to Fold Laundry; Weave Robotics Prices at $8,000, 2026 Delivery

Multiple robotics startups are using laundry folding as a key breakthrough for home robots to enter households. Companies including Figure AI, Sunday Robotics, Weave Robotics, and 1X have raised a combined billions of dollars in funding, and have recently demonstrated autonomous clothes-folding capabilities. Clothing is a deformable object, requiring robots to recognize its state and perform grasping, unfolding, and folding, which demands high levels of perception and manipulation. The failure cost of folding laundry is relatively low—even if a robot drops an item during operation, it usually causes no damage—making it an accessible entry point for testing robots' abilities in home environments. Home settings are more complex than factories and warehouses, but folding tasks can confine robots to a fixed area, reducing the difficulty of autonomous movement.

Robot laundry folding is not a new concept. A Japanese company once launched the Laundroid folding robot at $16,000, but the company filed for bankruptcy in 2019. FoldiMate appeared at multiple trade shows but ultimately never achieved product delivery. Excessively high costs and insufficient reliability were the main reasons previous products failed to open up the market.

Weave Robotics' Isaac robot is priced at $8,000, or $449 per month via subscription. Manufacturers are now attempting to teach robots a wider range of household chores. Sunday's AI system is learning tasks such as vacuuming, tidying toys, zipping zippers, and making coffee, while 1X's NEO humanoid robot is planned to handle laundry folding, shelf organizing, and room tidying.

Behind these household scenarios lies a need for real-world data. Unlike large language models trained on internet data, robots lack physical-world training data of comparable scale. Sunday currently collects data on human daily tasks using gloves equipped with sensors, priced at about $200, to train robot models.