While many robotics companies are building human-sized robots, or working to automate entire factories, MicroFactory is instead trying to think big by building small.
San Francisco-based MicroFactory built a general-purpose, tabletop manufacturing kit that’s about the size of my Siberian Husky’s dog crate. This compact factory includes two robotic arms and can be trained by human demonstration, as well as through AI.
“General purpose robots are good, but it’s not necessary [to] be humanoid,” said Igor Kulakov, the co-founder and CEO of MicroFactory, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We decided to design robots from scratch that will still be general purpose but not in human shape, and this way, it can be done much simpler, much easier, in hardware and on the AI side.”
Rather than selling individual robotic arms, MicroFactory’s system comes as an enclosed but transparent workstation, allowing users to watch the manufacturing process in real time. The compact factory-in-a-box is designed for precision tasks like circuit board assembly, component soldering, and cable routing. Users can train the robots by physically guiding the arms through complex motions — a hands-on approach that Kulakov says works faster than traditional AI programming for intricate manufacturing sequences.
“Usually it takes couple hours, but in this way, the robot much better understands what it should do,” Kulakov said. “When you hire people, we still need to spend time, like a week or something, to instruct these people to then supervise their work. A manufacturing company, they already have this time and resources to spend, and it will be much easier to train a model and to make it work in this way.”
Kulakov’s experience with traditional manufacturing helped spark the idea behind MicroFactory.
He and his co-founder, Viktor Petrenko, used to run bitLighter, a manufacturing business that made portable lighting equipment for photographers. Kulakov said it was difficult to train new employees on how to complete the manufacturing process correctly. When advancements in AI made it seem possible to automate this type of work, they decided to jump on the opportunity.
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Kulakov and Petrenko launched MicroFactory in 2024. It took them about five months to build their prototype. Now the company has hundreds of preorders from customers looking to use the machines for various applications, including assembling electronics and even processing snails to be shipped to France for escargot.
MicroFactory just raised a $1.5 million pre-seed funding round that included investors like executives from the AI company Hugging Face and investor-entrepreneur Naval Ravikant. The round values the young startup at a $30 million post-money valuation.
Kulakov said the company plans to use the funding to build and ship out its units. The company is currently converting its prototype into a commercial product that it hopes to begin shipping in about two months.
The company also plans to make some hires and continue improving its technology, including the AI models running under the hood.
“Our growth is related to building hardware, so we set the goal to increase it 10x each year,” Kulakov said. “In the first year, we want to produce 1,000 robots, [about] three per day, and we have the capability to do this. Then, [we want to] make more and more productions.”
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![New Google commercial imagines a Declaration of Independence written with help from AI | TechCrunch
Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial from Google asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace?
With the tagline “Group project, but make it 1776,” the ad depicts a largely unseen Thomas Jefferson mid-draft when he gets a nagging text from Ben Franklin, leading to a very Google-centric collaboration process. Edits are suggested in Google Docs, a meeting gets scheduled in Google Calendar and conducted remotely via Google Meet (with every single attendee apparently turning their camera off?), then the whole thing is finalized with e-signatures; cue the fireworks.
Of course, since this is an ad from a tech company in the year 2026, AI has a role to play. The fictionalized founders use Google’s “help me visualize” AI tool to try out different animals on the national seal, Gemini takes notes on the meeting, and the founders also ask the chatbot for advice before declining King George III’s document access request.
The whole thing is very tongue-in-cheek (at one point, Sam Adams asks, “Can we settle this over beers?”), and the AI evangelism is relatively discreet when compared to many other recent ads. And unlike that infamous Google commercial in which a father uses Gemini to write a fan letter for his daughter, this one shies away from any suggestion that the actual text of the Declaration of Independence would be improved with AI. Perhaps the most AI-forward element of the ad is the footage itself, which to my eye has the uncanny glow of AI-generated video.
While viewer comments on YouTube and Instagram appear to be mostly positive, you may not be surprised to learn that the response on Bluesky has been far more critical. Posters declared the commercial “cringey” and “stunningly tone deaf,” and the AI angle was the biggest target — even as many users, including historian Angus Johnston, noted that it’s “amazing how little of this is actually AI.”
“Even in a corny fantasy joke, it’s impossible to make the case that AI is a useful tool for political organizing, writing, or human collaboration,” Johnston said.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3RjZY-rSsc[/embed]
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Google #commercial #imagines #Declaration #Independence #written #TechCrunchgemini,Google](https://i2.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/google-declaration-of-independence.jpg?w=1200&ssl=1 "New Google commercial imagines a Declaration of Independence written with help from AI | TechCrunch
Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial from Google asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace?
With the tagline “Group project, but make it 1776,” the ad depicts a largely unseen Thomas Jefferson mid-draft when he gets a nagging text from Ben Franklin, leading to a very Google-centric collaboration process. Edits are suggested in Google Docs, a meeting gets scheduled in Google Calendar and conducted remotely via Google Meet (with every single attendee apparently turning their camera off?), then the whole thing is finalized with e-signatures; cue the fireworks.
Of course, since this is an ad from a tech company in the year 2026, AI has a role to play. The fictionalized founders use Google’s “help me visualize” AI tool to try out different animals on the national seal, Gemini takes notes on the meeting, and the founders also ask the chatbot for advice before declining King George III’s document access request.
The whole thing is very tongue-in-cheek (at one point, Sam Adams asks, “Can we settle this over beers?”), and the AI evangelism is relatively discreet when compared to many other recent ads. And unlike that infamous Google commercial in which a father uses Gemini to write a fan letter for his daughter, this one shies away from any suggestion that the actual text of the Declaration of Independence would be improved with AI. Perhaps the most AI-forward element of the ad is the footage itself, which to my eye has the uncanny glow of AI-generated video.
While viewer comments on YouTube and Instagram appear to be mostly positive, you may not be surprised to learn that the response on Bluesky has been far more critical. Posters declared the commercial “cringey” and “stunningly tone deaf,” and the AI angle was the biggest target — even as many users, including historian Angus Johnston, noted that it’s “amazing how little of this is actually AI.”
“Even in a corny fantasy joke, it’s impossible to make the case that AI is a useful tool for political organizing, writing, or human collaboration,” Johnston said.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3RjZY-rSsc[/embed]
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Google #commercial #imagines #Declaration #Independence #written #TechCrunchgemini,Google")
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