Labrador Systems
Labrador Systems is an Assistive Home Robots company founded in 2017 and based in Calabasas, California, United States. It has raised $5.5M in total funding, most recently a Seed in 2022.
Labrador Systems builds the Retriever, a height-adjustable, semi-autonomous mobile shelf robot designed to carry food, laundry, medication, and other household items (up to ~25 pounds) for older adults and people with mobility challenges. The Retriever uses a combination of markers and on-board mapping to navigate familiar home environments and docks itself at waist height so items can be moved without lifting or bending.
The company was founded in 2017 in Calabasas, California by CEO Mike Dooley (previously VP of Product at Evolution Robotics and a Vice President at iRobot following iRobot's acquisition of Evolution) and CTO Nikolai Romanov. Labrador is one of the few robotics startups explicitly targeting the assistive / aging-in-place use case rather than general-purpose home automation.
Labrador has raised a modest amount of disclosed capital — a USD 3.1M seed round in January 2022 led by iRobot Ventures, with additional seed, grant, and prize funding from SOSV/HAX, Amazon's Alexa Fund, Grep VC, SkyRiver Ventures, NSF SBIR, and the Joseph F. Engelberger Foundation — bringing total disclosed funding to roughly USD 5.5M. The company launched its first commercial deployments in late 2022 with Masonic Homes of California (MHC) and Eskaton, and has positioned a 'Retriever Pro' robots-as-a-service offering at home care and senior living operators.
Labrador is one of the only US startups focused on the assistive-home-robot niche, a category with clear demographic tailwinds and a plausible path to reimbursement through senior living and home care operators rather than consumer channels.
labradorsystems.com ↗·Assistive Home Robots·
United States·private 
