Furhat Robotics

Furhat Robotics is a Swedish company that develops and markets a social robotics and conversational AI platform. The company was founded in 2014 as a spin-off from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm by Samer Al Moubayed, Gabriel Skantze, Jonas Beskow, and Preben Wik. The founders have extensive backgrounds in computer science, speech technology, and human-robot interaction, with their academic research at KTH forming the foundation of the company.

The company's core product is the Furhat robot, a humanoid bust that uses back-projection technology to display customizable, animated faces on a translucent mask, enabling lifelike expressions and social cues. This design allows the robot to interact with people through speech, gaze, and head movements, supporting over 40 languages. The platform is designed for developers and researchers, offering a software development kit (SDK) that includes a no-code graphical builder and APIs in Kotlin and Python, allowing for the creation of sophisticated applications. In early 2022, Furhat Robotics acquired U.S.-based Misty Robotics, adding a mobile robot platform to its product line.

Furhat Robotics operates on a B2B platform-based business model, generating revenue from hardware sales, SDK licenses, and enterprise partnerships. Its clients include universities, research institutions, and major corporations like Disney, Honda, and Deutsche Bahn, which use the platform for research and applied use cases in areas such as customer service, education, healthcare, and recruitment. A notable application was the development of Tengai, a recruitment robot created with Swedish firm TNG to conduct unbiased job interviews.

Keywords: social robotics, conversational AI, human-robot interaction, humanoid robot, artificial intelligence platform, speech recognition, facial animation, developer SDK, research robot, human-computer interaction, embodied AI, robotics hardware, AI software, customer service robot, education technology, healthcare robotics, KTH spinoff