Billion-Dollar Robotics Startups Obsessed with Folding Laundry

Several high-valuation robotics startups — Figure AI, Sunday Robotics, and Weave Robotics — are focusing on developing robots that autonomously fold clothes. This task was chosen as the first commercial target because it is challenging enough to demonstrate intelligence and physical control, yet safe since failures have no consequences. Roboticists describe clothes folding as a "deformable object manipulation" problem, historically considered a "holy grail" of robotics. While earlier generations of laundry robots like Laundroid failed due to high costs and poor reliability, developers claim that recent advances in AI, cheaper hardware, and massive investment in physical AI change the landscape. Current models can already fold clothes much faster than predecessors, although individual items may still take minutes.