Furhat Robotics AB

Furhat Robotics AB

Furhat Robotics AB was founded in 2014 by Sam Al Moubayed, Jonas Beskow, and Gabriel Skantze, all researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology's Department of Speech, Music and Hearing. The company emerged from a decade of academic work on conversational AI and facial animation, commercializing what was initially a research prototype into a full-stack robotics platform. The firm's strategy centers on a social robotics platform that combines computer vision, natural language processing, and expressive facial animation—projected onto a 3D-printed mask—to create what it calls the 'human interface for AI.' Furhat targets three primary sectors: education (language learning, special needs support), healthcare (patient interaction, cognitive therapy), and enterprise (front desk, information kiosks, and retail). The company raised a $7.5M Series A round led by EQTVentures in 2020, and a $25M Series B led by AM Ventures and Livingstone in 2023 (per Crunchbase, 2023). Portfolio deployments include deployments in Swedish hospitals, Japanese universities, and Middle Eastern educational institutions. Furhat Robotics operates out of its Stockholm headquarters with approximately 60 employees as of early 2025 (per public reporting). The company maintains an open robotics platform, enabling third-party developers to build custom applications atop Furhat's SDK. In September 2024, the firm announced a partnership with SoftBank Robotics to integrate Furhat's conversational AI into SoftBank's humanoid robots for the Asian market (per the firm's press release, September 2024). No family office or asset management entity is known to be affiliated with Furhat Robotics; the company is a standalone venture-backed robotics firm. Furhat's structural differentiator lies in its decision to focus on the software layer of human-robot interaction rather than building full-body hardware. This permits faster iteration, lower unit costs, and a path to licensing its technology to other robotics manufacturers—a licensing model unusual for a social robotics startup.