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May 10, 2026 • 6 min read

Companies We're Watching, and Why

RoboticsLandscapeOpen Research

This would be scary if you were trying to compete with it. We are not.

Instead of fighting the technology, we want to learn it and build with it. Here is a quick tour of the teams we follow, and why each one matters for growing, harvesting, and preparing food. The full, updated list lives on Companies We Watch.

Available today

FarmBot is the one you can order right now: an open-source CNC farming robot for raised beds, run by a nonprofit that has been at this for nearly a decade. It is where we tell most people to start.

The manipulation frontier

Harvest, wash-up, and kitchen-adjacent tasks are where cheap arms fail first. Contact, clutter, and two hands working together are hard. A few groups are pushing on exactly this:

  • Trossen Robotics / ALOHA make the low-cost, open bimanual rigs behind much of the recent imitation-learning research.
  • Physical Intelligence is building general-purpose robot foundation models meant to control many different robots across many tasks.
  • Google DeepMind has shown dexterous, contact-rich manipulation with systems like ALOHA Unleashed and DemoStart.

The humanoids

The general-purpose humanoid race matters because a machine that works in a human space could, eventually, work in a garden or a kitchen:

  • Figure and its Helix model, where robots teach each other tasks.
  • 1X with a home-focused humanoid.
  • Agility Robotics, already running bipedal robots in logistics pilots, a near-term look at machines doing real labor.

Why the open paper matters

Almost all of this traces back to one 2017 paper, “Attention Is All You Need”. The transformer architecture it introduced is the baseline for the models now driving these robots.

That is the bet behind Johnny Autoseed: the capability curve keeps going up and the cost curve keeps going down. Rather than treat that as a threat, we want a place ready to plug these machines in when they arrive, to test what they can really do, and to write the policies and norms that do not exist yet.

We are not affiliated with any company mentioned here. Trademarks belong to their owners. See disclaimers.