Hugging Face launched the Reachy Mini, a quirky, Raspberry Pi-powered robot with big googly eyes and cartoon antennae. It’s open source and doesn’t do much out of the box — that’s the idea.
The bot pulled in $500,000 in sales within its first 24 hours. The launch caught attention despite its minimal functionality. Hosts Kirsten Korosec and Max Zeff called Reachy Mini the “Seinfeld” of AI hardware: it might not do much, but people are hooked anyway.
The news came up on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast with Korosec, Zeff, and Anthony Ha. They also covered broader tech updates on the same episode. 
Equity posts new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and follow on X and Threads.
Hugging Face’s new programmable Reachy Mini bots launched this week. The AI robots are open source, Raspberry Pi-powered, and come with cartoonish antennae and big googly eyes. They don’t do much out of the box. And that’s kind of the point.
