Colin Angle, the robotics engineer who co-founded iRobot and spent 25 years turning the Roomba into the world’s most widely adopted home robot, has unveiled the prototype for his next act: a four-legged, plush-covered AI companion designed to follow you around your house, adapt to your daily habits, and make you feel something when it greets you at the door.

The robot is called the Familiar, and the company behind it is Familiar Machines & Magic, a startup that operated in stealth mode in Woburn, Massachusetts until Angle brought a working prototype to the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference in New York on 4 May. The device is roughly the size of a bulldog, with doe-like eyes, bear cub ears and paws, and touch-sensitive synthetic fur. It makes emotive, animal-like sounds but does not talk. It has audio input that allows it to listen and learn from what you say to it, and its AI system, built on generative AI advances, gradually adapts its behaviour as it gets to know the people around it.

“We chose a form factor that’s not a human, not a dog, not a cat, because we wanted to steer away from all of those preconceptions,” Angle told the Associated Press. “The challenge is to make something that’s not a watch-me toy. This is about having something that you want to hug, you want to pet. When it’s happy, that makes you happy.”

The idea of an artificial companion animal is not new. Sony introduced its plastic robotic dog Aibo in the late 1990s and rebooted the concept in 2018. MIT researcher Cynthia Breazeal, who is now one of Angle’s advisers at Familiar Machines, created the robot head Kismet and later the tabletop speaker robot Jibo, both early experiments in giving machines social expressions. Jibo shipped, found a loyal niche audience, and then shut down. The haa gatistory of social robots is littered with products that charmed early adopters and failed to reach sustained commercial scale.

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Angle believes the Familiar is different because the underlying technology has finally caught up to the concept. “I couldn’t have done this six months ago,” he said. The generative AI systems that power ChatGPT and similar products have given the Familiar a capacity for contextual learning and adaptive behaviour that previous companion robots lacked. The device is mobile enough to follow you to the kitchen, large enough to physically interact with, and, Angle claims, capable of developing what amounts to a personality shaped by its owner’s behaviour over time.

The timing of the venture is inseparable from what happened to iRobot. Angle co-founded the company in 1990 alongside other members of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Over the next three decades, iRobot sold more than 50 million Roomba robots and became, for most consumers, the first and only home robot they ever owned. In 2022, Amazon announced a $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot. Regulators in the US and Europe spent 18 months investigating the deal before Amazon abandoned it in January 2024, citing insurmountable regulatory obstacles. Amazon later pivoted to acquiring smaller robotics startups, including Fauna Robotics and its approachable humanoid Sprout, and Rivr, a Zurich-based stair-climbing delivery robot. iRobot, stripped of its acquisition lifeline and unable to compete with cheaper Chinese rivals, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025. Its assets were sold to a Chinese manufacturer. Angle stepped down as CEO and chairman in 2024 and founded Familiar Machines shortly afterwards.

Angle has described the iRobot bankruptcy as “avoidable” and the regulatory process as “wrong-minded,” telling TechCrunch and Fox Business that the FTC treated blocked deals “like trophies.” The experience appears to have shaped his new venture. Where iRobot was a hardware manufacturing company that needed to compete on price against Chinese fast followers, Familiar Machines is positioning itself around a product whose value is defined by its AI behaviour, not its bill of materials. A plush companion robot that learns and adapts is harder to clone than a vacuum cleaner.

One target demographic is retired people who are past the peak age of pet ownership. “Not because people suddenly stop enjoying pets, but the fear and obligation of caring for them are such that people are very reluctant to get new pets at older ages,” Angle said. The companion robot market for elderly care is projected to grow from $480 million in 2025 to over $1.2 billion by 2035, according to Fact.MR, driven by ageing populations in Japan, Europe, and North America.

Angle has assembled a board of advisers drawn from the upper ranks of robotics research. Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics and pioneer of legged robot locomotion, is among them, alongside Breazeal. Many of the advisers researched together at MIT and share a scepticism toward the current boom in humanoid robots, which they view as machines that can walk impressively but cannot yet do much useful physical work. The humanoid market is attracting billions in venture capital and M&A, with Tesla, 1X, Apptronik, Unitree, and now Meta all racing to build general-purpose bipedal robots for factories and homes. Angle is deliberately moving in the opposite direction: a robot that does not pretend to be useful, but aims to be emotionally meaningful.

It could take a while before the Familiar goes on sale. Angle has not disclosed pricing, production timelines, or funding. The name itself is drawn from folklore, the animal companion of a witch or wizard, a concept familiar from Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” novels. Angle was surprised to discover he could trademark it.

The bet is that the next successful home robot will not be one that vacuums your floor or folds your laundry, but one that makes you feel less alone. Companies like 1X are shipping humanoid robots into American homes at $20,000 per unit, but those machines are designed for physical tasks. The Familiar is designed for emotional ones. Whether a plush robot with bear cub ears can achieve what Aibo, Jibo, and a generation of social robots could not, in a market that has historically punished emotional computing with indifference, is the question Angle is staking his post-iRobot career on.

He built the robot that cleaned your floor. Now he wants to build the one you miss when it’s not in the room.