Colin Angle, the cofounder of iRobot whose Roomba put 50 million household robots into people's homes, unveiled a new robot this week — and it does not vacuum. His new startup, Familiar Machines & Magic, showed off a dog-sized quadruped companion robot codenamed Ami at the WSJ Future of Everything conference on May 4, 2026, designed to form an emotional bond rather than clean a floor.
The robot has 23 degrees of freedom, walks on four legs at human pace, and runs on an Nvidia Jetson Orin chip executing a custom small multimodal model on-device. It does not require an internet connection and does not stream audio or video to the cloud, a deliberate privacy choice. It also does not talk: communication is nonverbal, with meowing and purring sounds, plus movable eyes, ears, and eyebrows.
Angle is calling the category a Familiar, after the folkloric supernatural companion. The first one will not be on sale until next year at the earliest, and Angle says pricing will land around the cost of pet ownership. The company is targeting families with young children, eldercare, and what Angle frames as the global loneliness problem.
Key facts
- 01Colin Angle, who put 50 million Roombas into homes, debuted Familiar at the WSJ Future of Everything conference on May 4, 2026.
- 02The first Familiar, codenamed Ami, has 23 degrees of freedom and runs on an Nvidia Jetson Orin chip with on-device AI.
- 03Ami won't ship until next year at the earliest and will cost roughly the same as pet ownership.
- 04Angle stepped down as iRobot CEO in 2024 after the Amazon acquisition collapsed; iRobot was founded in 1990 as Artificial Creatures Inc.
- 05Cofounders include iRobot veterans Ira Renfrew and Chris Jones, with hires from Disney, MIT, Boston Dynamics, Amazon, Bose, and Sonos.
Familiar Machines & Magic is the second act for an executive whose first one ran 34 years. iRobot was founded in 1990 under the original name Artificial Creatures Inc., before the tech to deliver on that name existed. Angle stepped down as CEO in 2024 after iRobot's sale to Amazon collapsed under regulatory pressure.
“If this is a toy, we've failed. If this is a creature that you want in your world, then we've knocked it out of the park.”— Jaeden Schafer
"Finally, I get to do what I originally set out to do," Angle said. "It's not just about building cool animatronics. Now is finally the time where the tech exists — if properly and responsibly used — to start creating Familiars." The cofounding team includes iRobot veterans Ira Renfrew and Chris Jones, plus hires from Disney, MIT, Boston Dynamics, Amazon, Bose, and Sonos.
Ami is intentionally not a humanoid and intentionally not a recognizable animal. Angle's argument is that a specific form factor — dog, cat, person — saddles the product with expectations it cannot meet. The four-legged base also addresses a practical concern: bipedal robots fall, and a falling 30-pound machine in a living room is a liability problem before it is a product problem.
The pitch leans hard on a thesis Angle calls the plate-of-glass test. "If a sheet of glass between you and the device wouldn't change the experience, it should just be a screen," he said. The Familiar is meant to nudge, hug, and be petted — its coat is touch-sensitive — and to pull users away from phones and tablets rather than add another one.
The model is also deliberately constrained. "By design, it will avoid giving factual advice about things that maybe it shouldn't be giving factual advice about," Angle said, a clear shot at the chatbot mishaps that have bruised every major lab over the past two years. The on-device approach means lower latency and a smaller blast radius if something goes wrong.
Companion robotics has a long graveyard. Jibo, Aibo, Vector, and Amazon's Astro all promised some version of the same emotional bond and either shut down, pivoted, or stalled in limited release. CES 2026 was full of products Angle dismisses as chatbots slapped into plastic. The skepticism is not unreasonable: consumers have repeatedly declined to pay pet-level prices for devices that end up in a closet within six months.
Angle is betting the difference is physical embodiment plus on-device generative AI mature enough to carry a personality across months of interaction. "If this is a toy, we've failed," he said. "If this is a creature that you want in your world, then we've knocked it out of the park. It's kind of one way or the other." Whether Ami nudges a teenager off TikTok or a lonely retiree off the couch is the actual product question, and one no demo video can answer.
Familiar's launch lands in a robotics market obsessed with humanoids and warehouse arms, where the money is chasing dexterity benchmarks and factory contracts. Angle is pointing the other direction — toward the living room, on a chip already shipping in millions of devices, at a price point a normal household might tolerate. If consumer robotics has a path back to mass adoption after the Roomba, it probably runs through something that looks more like a pet than a person, and Angle has the better claim than most to know which is which.
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