Flourish unveils $3,555 wheeled semi humanoid for homes

San Francisco startup Flourish has unveiled Flourish 1, a wheeled semi humanoid designed to handle light household chores. The robot costs $3,555, with preorders opening for an initial 50 units and deliveries scheduled to begin in December 2026, according to Forbes.

The price is the central proposition. Flourish has reduced hardware demands by using wheels, simple grippers and lower force arms rather than building a general purpose machine for industrial and domestic work. The result is a compact robot with a very limited payload, but one intended for objects such as clothes, shoes, toys and small watering cans.

Teaching chores by demonstration

Owners will teach Flourish 1 through a mobile app by physically demonstrating a task with a phone. Flourish says the process takes about 30 minutes for a new chore. Once trained, the robot can repeat that workflow autonomously and run it on a schedule.

Current tasks include putting shoes away, moving clothes into a laundry basket, discarding trash, wiping tables and watering plants. The company also lists dishwasher loading as a teachable chore, while unloading, table setting and food preparation remain planned capabilities.

Flourish does not intend to train one universal model that works identically in every home. Founder and CEO Antoine Marcel told Forbes that the company starts with pretrained models, then adapts them to a particular home, its objects and the owner’s preferred routines.

Tasks are divided into separate stages. Navigation and object detection bring the robot to an item, a vision language action policy handles manipulation, and navigation then carries it to the destination. This reduces the amount of training required for each workflow, although Marcel acknowledged that large environmental changes can still cause failures.

Low cost comes with clear limits

Flourish 1 has a wheeled base with a vertically moving upper body, head and two arms. It is therefore not equivalent to a full size bipedal humanoid. Its 3.3 pound payload rules out full laundry baskets, grocery bags and stacks of plates, while Forbes described its movement as slow and jerky.

Marcel said the robot works reliably on its current tasks but remains relatively slow. He also said it is designed to operate without remote human assistance once a task has been taught, although teleoperation is technically possible.

For safety, Flourish says LiDAR and cameras continuously monitor the surroundings, while the arms stop when a person enters their reachable area. The arms are deliberately lower force than industrial humanoid hardware. These performance and safety claims have not yet been independently evaluated in the Forbes report.

The startup has raised an undisclosed pre seed round led by Families Fund. The first 50 deliveries will provide the earliest indication of whether Flourish can turn its deliberately limited hardware and home specific training approach into dependable daily operation.

Source: Forbes