Misty Robotics, a spinoff of toymaker Sphero, raises $11.5M Series A led by Venrock and Foundry Group to create a mainstream robot for the home
Brian Heater / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Misty Robotics exists because Sphero chose to split its ambitions rather than stretch one company across them: the toymaker carved out a separate venture, backed by Venrock and Foundry Group, to chase a mainstream home robot while the parent stayed in toys. That separation proved prescient — within a year Sphero took the opposite path, laying off 45 staff after a disappointing holiday season and refocusing on education, leaving Misty as the vehicle carrying its general-robotics bet.
The spinoff also fits Sphero's broader pattern of hedging between consumer products and developer platforms, visible later in the RVR Kickstarter robot with a universal expansion port for accessories like Raspberry Pi.
First-order effects
- Venrock and Foundry Group get an early position in consumer home robotics at Series A scale, while Misty gains balance-sheet independence from Sphero's toy-cycle volatility.
- Sphero can keep pursuing its toy and education lines without diluting resources across a costly hardware category the parent had no clear path to monetize.
Second-order effects
- When Sphero's holiday sales disappointed and it cut 45 jobs, the spinoff structure meant the home-robot program survived intact inside Misty instead of being killed alongside the toy cutbacks.
- Misty's mainstream-home-robot thesis sets up a comparison point for later well-funded entrants like Figure, whose $70M Series A for a humanoid robot shows investors eventually paying far larger checks for the same general-purpose-home ambition.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer robotics consolidates around separately capitalized platform bets rather than product lines inside toy companies — with funding scales climbing from Misty's $11.5M toward the nine-figure rounds general-purpose robot builders now command.
- The toy-company-as-incubator model suggests home robotics talent and IP increasingly migrate out of entertainment businesses into dedicated ventures backed by institutional investors.
The trend: Home robotics is separating from the toy industry into independently funded platform companies, with investor check sizes scaling up as the ambition moves from gadgets to general-purpose robots.