Flourish Opens Preorders for $3,555 Trainable Home Robot

SAN FRANCISCO — Flourish Robots has opened preorders for a $3,555 home robot that the startup says can learn household chores from demonstrations recorded with a smartphone.

Flourish emerged from stealth Sept. 29 and introduced Flourish 1, opening preorders for an initial batch of 50 robots. Deliveries are scheduled to begin in December, according to the company's announcement.

Flourish says training takes 30 minutes, but this has not been independently verified. A user demonstrates the task using a mobile phone, after which the robot is intended to repeat the learned routine and perform it on a schedule. That 30-minute training time is a company claim and has not been independently established.

Possible tasks include picking up shoes, clothes and toys; loading the dishwasher; wiping tables; watering plants; fetching objects; and clearing the cat litter box.
The approach puts task teaching in the hands of the owner rather than limiting the robot to a fixed set of factory-programmed routines. The product tackles one of the harder problems in home robotics: adapting a machine to different objects and layouts without requiring the owner to program it.

But Flourish revealed minimal hardware details. Its launch announcement does not provide specifications for payload capacity, battery endurance, and the AI framework used by the robot. Also, no independent success rates for tasks across different homes and conditions.

Flourish was founded by CEO Antoine Marcel and is backed by Families Fund, which led the startup's pre-seed financing. The company did not disclose the size of that investment in its launch announcement.

At $3,555, the first 50 units provide a relatively low-cost entry point for a household robot designed to manipulate objects rather than primarily provide entertainment or companionship. Whether the robot can reliably reproduce taught tasks in varied domestic environments will be clearer only after units reach users.