Profile of Vancouver-based AI firm Kindred, founded by ex-D-Wave experts and backed in part by GV, which teaches robots how to be more humanlike
@GerritD More stories by Gerrit De Vynck — At startup Kindred, humans show bots how to pick up objects — Eventually, company sees machines intuiting when you're sad
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2016 Bloomberg profile introduces Kindred as a Vancouver bet on human-in-the-loop robotics: founded by ex-D-Wave experts, backed in part by GV, and built on the idea that humans demonstrating object-picking is how robots learn. The profile also flags the company's longer ambition — machines that intuit human emotion. Within a year the approach attracted strategic money, with Kindred raising a $28M Series B led by Tencent and launching pilot programs with Gap and other retailers.
The story reads differently a decade on: Kindred's premise that humans and robots need structured ways to teach and interact with each other has become its own funded category, from Enigma emerging from stealth to run large-scale human-robot interaction experiments to the current VC surge behind humanoid machines.
First-order effects
- GV's backing puts Google's venture arm early into learning-from-demonstration robotics, and gives Kindred a path from research demo toward commercial deployments like the retail picking pilots that followed.
Second-order effects
- Retailers such as Gap become the proving ground for human-taught picking robots, forcing warehouse automation vendors to compete on adaptability rather than fixed programming.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the human-teaching layer becomes an industry of its own — visible in the more than $5B VCs have poured into humanoid robotics startups since early 2024 and in dedicated interaction-research shops like Enigma — while the emotional-intuition goal Kindred sketched points toward the same companion-AI territory now drawing governance scrutiny.
The trend: Robotics is shifting from pre-programmed automation to systems trained through human demonstration, with human-robot interaction maturing into a distinct, heavily funded discipline.