Kindly Robotics Accepted into Y Combinator

We have some big news: Kindly Robotics has been accepted into Y Combinator's next batch. We're going to San Francisco to build the future of robot design tooling, and we couldn't be more excited about what this means for our community.

Why YC, Why Now

The robotics industry is at an inflection point. Foundation models are making it possible to train robots from demonstration data at scale. Hardware costs are dropping. But the tooling hasn't kept up—designing a robot still means hand-editing XML files, wrestling with physics simulators, and stitching together a dozen disconnected tools.

That's the gap Kindly fills. We're building the Cursor for robotics—an AI-native IDE where you describe what you need in natural language and get a complete, physics-validated robot design that exports to URDF, SDF, or MJCF.

YC gives us the resources and network to move faster. The robotics batch alumni include companies like Covariant, Skydio, and Nuro—we'll be learning from the best.

What This Means for the IDE

With YC backing, we're doubling down on the features that matter most:

• Mesh generation — AI-generated 3D meshes so robots look real, not like stacks of cylinders
• Simulation integration — one-click launch into Gazebo, MuJoCo, or Isaac Sim
• Collaboration — share robot designs, fork and modify, build on each other's work
• Hardware export — generate manufacturing files (STEP, DXF) alongside the robot description

The IDE will remain free and open source. That's not changing. YC's investment accelerates development; it doesn't put features behind a paywall.

What This Means for FoodforThought

Our open data platform, FoodforThought, is the other half of the vision. The IDE generates robot designs; FoodforThought provides the training data to make those robots actually do things.

• Dataset scale — growing beyond 130K trajectories
• Labeling infrastructure — easier community annotations
• Skill transfer — improving cross-embodiment compatibility

What This Means for the Community

Over the next few months, expect more frequent releases, better documentation, a growing team, and events in SF and online for the robotics community.

Thank You

To everyone who's downloaded the IDE, labeled a dataset, filed a bug report, or told a colleague about Kindly: thank you. YC saw what you see—that robotics tooling is broken and we're the team to fix it.

This is just the beginning. Let's build.