📊 See AI app rankings

📱 Get the AI Rank app

Pollen Robotics is a Bordeaux, France robotics company that builds expressive, interactive robots for AI builders and labs. It was established in 2016 by former researchers from Inria's Flowers team, including co-founders Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet. Product names you will see on the site include Reachy 2, Reachy Mini, and Microduck. On April 14, 2025, Hugging Face announced that it was welcoming Pollen Robotics into the company. The store legal notice (updated August 27, 2026) lists the publisher as Pollen Robotics SAS, a Hugging Face company, with Hugging Face Inc. as parent.

Hugging Face and independent coverage (TechCrunch, Fortune) describe the deal as an undisclosed-amount acquisition and Hugging Face's move into selling robot hardware alongside its open AI platform. TechCrunch cites prior fundraising of about €2.5 million (Crunchbase), including Bpifrance; Fortune likewise notes co-founders and roughly 20 employees joining Hugging Face. Treat press fundraising figures as secondary reporting, not filings reviewed here.

What Pollen Robotics makes

The company homepage frames the lineup for AI builders and makers: program the robots, play with them, and customize them. Current consumer-facing highlights include:

  • Reachy Mini — an expressive companion robot for human interaction, creative coding, and AI experiments. The homepage states 10,000+ shipped worldwide.
  • Microduck — a roughly 25 cm biped with 15 motors that walks, grasps with its beak, gets back up, and can learn tricks you train.

The research / lab flagship remains Reachy 2, documented on a dedicated product page and at docs.pollen-robotics.com. Hugging Face's acquisition post said labs such as Cornell and Carnegie Mellon were already using Reachy 2, and that orders went through sales@pollen-robotics.com at $70,000 at announcement time. Confirm current pricing and SKUs on the official store or sales channel before buying; list prices and product mix change.

Reachy 2: open humanoid for embodied AI

Pollen's Reachy 2 page calls it an open-source humanoid for embodied AI and real-world applications: a bimanual mobile manipulator aimed at AI and robotics labs. Official claims on that page include:

Claim (company page) Detail
Control stack ROS 2 Humble + Python SDK; teleoperation or Python control
Arms 7 degrees of freedom; payload about 3 kg per arm
Height / mass Adjustable height 136–166 cm; full robot weight up to 50 kg
Actuation highlight Orbita 2D/3D parallel actuators (neck/wrists expressiveness)
Mobile base Omnidirectional base with three omniwheels, sensors, LiDAR
Vision Stereo + RGB-D
Teleoperation VR teleoperation app: move arms, hands, and head; see through onboard cameras

Software resources on GitHub under pollen-robotics include reachy2-sdk (Python SDK, Apache-2.0) and reachy2_core (ROS 2 packages for description, simulation, and control). Official docs cover setup, safety, SDK tutorials, simulation, perception, and teleoperation.

Hugging Face also hosts a pollen-robotics organization on the Hub for community assets tied to the brand.

Open source: what official pages say

Marketing pages for Reachy 2 say "fully open source" and "open hardware, open software." The store legal notice is more precise and should govern expectations for Reachy Mini and Microduck:

  • Certain software components of Reachy Mini and Microduck are released under open-source licenses as indicated in official documentation on GitHub.
  • Unless the documentation expressly says otherwise, mechanical and electronic design files are not released under an open-source license.
  • Open-source licenses do not cover Pollen Robotics or Hugging Face trademarks or brand assets.

For Reachy 2 SDK / core packages, check each repository's LICENSE and docs rather than assuming every CAD or electronics file is free to copy. When in doubt, follow the license file and docs.pollen-robotics.com, not press summaries.

The acquisition sits on top of an existing robotics collaboration. Hugging Face's April 2025 post timelines:

  • 2024: Rémi Cadène (ex-Tesla Optimus) joins Hugging Face; the team launches the LeRobot open-source robotics library; June 2024 collaboration with Pollen on Reachy 2 as an open robot powered by LeRobot; later SO-100 arm work with The Robot Studio and NVIDIA collaboration notes.
  • 2025: further LeRobot ecosystem releases (including NVIDIA GR00T N1 on the Hub and Yaak L2D dataset mentions in the same HF timeline).

Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face co-founder / chief scientist) and Matthieu Lapeyre (Pollen co-founder) are quoted in the acquisition blog on keeping robotics open, affordable, and community-accessible. Hugging Face called this its fifth acquisition after moves such as Gradio and XetHub.

Pollen's HF org page restates: founded 2016 in Bordeaux by former Inria researchers; part of Hugging Face since 2025.

Who uses Reachy (company-cited)

The Hugging Face acquisition article says Reachy has been adopted by institutions including Accenture, CEA, CNRS, Cornell University, and Carnegie Mellon University, and that hundreds of units were deployed across more than 20 countries. It also notes a second-place finish at the ANA Avatar XPRIZE in 2022. Those are company / HF statements, not independent audits.

Ordering and support surfaces

Prices and stock change; verify on the official store or sales channel before ordering.

Sources

Keep exploring: see which AI apps are rising in the app rankings on AI Rank.

Or 📱 get the AI Rank app to follow them on your phone.

Prepared with automated editorial assistance and checked against Hugging Face, Pollen Robotics, and dated press sources on October 26, 2026.

Cover: AI Rank title card (no third-party photo).