On a cold morning in Dallas shortly before Christmas last year, CEO Colin Webb watched one of his robots work an eight-hour shift alongside warehouse workers. The wheeled machine, equipped with two robotic arms, spent the day packing beauty products into pouches as part of a pilot.
A few miles away, a person inside an Airbnb controlled its every move using a Meta Quest headset.
The shift tested the unconventional model behind Webb’s startup, Avatar Robotics. Rather than waiting for robots to become autonomous, the company puts them to work in warehouses, packing and sorting products under the control of teleoperators, who puppeteer their movements through headsets and handheld controllers.
The San Francisco startup announced Wednesday that it has raised a $6.5 million seed round led by AlleyCorp and Defy.vc, Headline, and Henry Ford III, among others. It said its robots have packed nearly 1 million items since its launch in December and operate across several warehouse facilities.
Avatar does not sell its robots directly. Instead, it charges customers a recurring fee that Webb said is less than the cost of hiring warehouse workers directly. That’s because many of its teleoperators are contractors based in Mexico, Colombia, and the Philippines, earning between $5 and $20 an hour depending on their location. Customers know the machines are remote workers in robotic bodies, Webb said.
There’s a bigger prize buried in this arrangement. As investors pour billions into “physical AI” — systems built to act in the real world — robotics companies are scrambling for real-world data needed to train the “brains” behind them. Startups, including microagi, Turing, and micro1, already pay people to record themselves performing tasks such as cleaning homes and cooking meals.
Avatar’s operators generate that data while performing work for paying customers. Every teleoperation session captures what the robot sees and how its human operator responds in real time. Avatar uses that information to adapt open-source robotics models, with the goal of teaching its machines to do more of the work on their own.
Unlike companies such as Agility Robotics, Figure AI, and Tesla, which build their own robots, Avatar sources wheeled humanoids from China and operates them via teleoperation.
“Is it better to strap sensors to people and pay them to collect data all over the world, or is it better to have those people do direct work that is valuable immediately?” Webb said in an interview with Business Insider. “The latter seems like the more valuable path.”
If the bet pays off, Webb envisions a fleet of millions of autonomous robots in factories, farms, and mines — an “unlimited workforce for industrial labor,” as he puts it. In the meantime, Avatar gets what most robotics companies badly need: a growing trove of high-quality training data generated through deployments that already produce revenue.
From an apartment experiment to the warehouse floor
Webb, 30, led his Atlanta high school’s robotics club before studying at MIT and working at Cruise, General Motors’ now-defunct autonomous vehicle company. After selling a software startup in 2024, he saw a business opportunity in cheaper robots, faster internet, and improving AI.
Webb launched Avatar from his San Francisco apartment last year. He ordered a robot from China, repurposed a treadmill as a conveyor belt, and climbed onto the roof of his building to install a satellite dish to ensure a stable connection. Then he flew to Orlando, where he used a headset to make the robot sort products from 2,000 miles away.
Webb then focused on making the robot durable enough to last an eight-hour shift. When its grippers kept breaking, he commissioned stronger replacements from China.
The company declined to say how many robots it has deployed, how many customers pay to use them, or how many facilities they operate in.
“This year is about getting each customer to expand to dozens of robots,” Webb said. “Next year, it will be about getting them into the hundreds.”
New Federal Communications Commission restrictions on foreign-made “advanced robotic devices” could cut off Avatar’s supply chain, forcing it to stop sourcing robots from China and start assembling them in the US.
Webb said he isn’t worried. Avatar’s software can run on a variety of robots, he said, and he views the restrictions as an opportunity to take a step toward his eventual goal of building its own robot fleet.
“The business stays the same,” he said.
AlleyCorp investor Brannon Jones said Avatar stood out because it could deliver useful work before reaching autonomy.
“Nobody was doing it in a way that was technically viable, novel, and scalable at the same time,” Jones said.
I got to try being a robot teleoperator
For now, Avatar’s robots remain mostly under human control. While most operators work from dedicated facilities, Webb envisions people eventually controlling robots from home and getting paid to “plug into a major economy.”
“It’s like playing a video game for eight hours. It’s so fun,” Webb said.
At Avatar’s San Francisco headquarters, I got to try my hand at being a teleoperator. Wearing a headset and using handheld controllers, I guided a robot to pick up packets of fishing bait and drop them into boxes moving along a conveyor belt. As someone who never plays video games and has terrible hand-eye coordination, I found the exercise far from fun. In my first few minutes, I managed to pick up just two packets.
Angel Avila, Avatar’s teleoperations supervisor, said many operators prefer the job to working in warehouses, though eight-hour shifts can still cause arm and shoulder cramps.
“We even have a massage gun in the office,” Avila said.
Avatar’s business model raises an obvious question: are its teleoperators training themselves out of a job?
Webb says no. As the robots become more autonomous, he said, humans will oversee larger fleets and step in only when needed. Unlike Elon Musk, who predicts AI and robots will eventually make human labor optional, Webb doesn’t envision a future without work. Nor is he concerned that Avatar’s operators won’t have jobs in the future.
“We constantly create new jobs as we create new industries,” Webb said. “Over the next few decades, we are going to create jobs we can’t even imagine today.”
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