Nori prices its wheeled A3 humanoid at $1,688

Why it matters

At $1,688, Nori can put bimanual hardware into far more labs and homes, while its user-trained model makes software adoption and support the real test.

Antonio Sitong Li (@AntonioSitongLi) opened orders on August 18th for Nori Robotics' A3, a $1,688 wheeled robot with two arms, cameras, lidar and software that lets owners teach it new tasks.

The five-person San Francisco company, founded this year and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, plans to ship the current run this fall. Nori's order page lists the full $1,688 price rather than a deposit and includes access to an open-source software development kit, its user community and priority shipping.

Nori is pricing the A3 for developers and early adopters willing to help finish the product. The company shows the robot fetching items from a refrigerator, loading dishes, folding clothes and pouring ingredients. Its published documentation is less complete: the Nori developer site says full A3 documentation is still coming, while offering guides for teleoperation, video streaming and browser-based robot control.

That distinction defines Li's initial market. The A3 is closer to a programmable robotics platform than a household appliance that arrives with a dependable catalog of chores.

Appliance pricing, developer expectations

Li studied computer science and architecture at Columbia, according to Nori's YC profile, which says his research focused on teaching robots through virtual-reality demonstrations. Columbia separately lists Li as a Class of 2028 student whose accessibility project used pathfinding software to generate compliant ramp designs.

Li's founding thesis is cost discipline. Nori says researchers have spent years using six-figure machines for work that cheaper hardware could perform. Its answer is a robot assembled in San Francisco from a mix of accessible components and open-source software.

Nori's public GitHub organization shows part of that approach. Its Nori Lab interface is a fork of an existing web interface built around Hugging Face's LeRobot project, while another repository forks the open-source XLeRobot design. Nori is combining existing robotics work with its own hardware, control software and developer tools rather than engineering every layer from scratch.

The A3 has a wheeled base instead of legs, with a listed payload of 1.5 kilograms per arm. Nori says it includes four 720p cameras, a lidar sensor with a 12-meter range, a microphone and speaker, and six to eight hours of battery life. A laptop application handles training, operation and robot management.

Nori's launch materials also advertise 19 degrees of freedom and a 55-kilogram linear lift. The arm payload remains the more relevant figure for household work: each arm is rated to carry about 3.3 pounds.

The 3% claim depends on the comparison

Nori's YC directory headline describes the A3 as costing 3% of competing robots, while Li's original YC launch post uses a 10% comparison. Current list prices show why one percentage cannot describe the market.

Unitree lists its bipedal G1 at $13,500, making the A3 about 12.5% of that price. 1X offers early ownership of its NEO home robot for $20,000, putting Nori at 8.4%. Weave Robotics prices its wheeled Isaac 1 at $7,999, meaning the A3 costs about 21% as much.

Those products also bundle different hardware and service models. NEO is a full biped with remote expert assistance for unfamiliar tasks. Isaac 1 promises autonomous laundry and room-tidying functions with teleoperation when needed. Nori expects owners to train skills, write software and share capabilities through a planned marketplace.

The low price transfers part of the development work to customers. That gives Nori a plausible route to broader hardware distribution while keeping its own engineering and support burden contained.

The robots feed the training loop

Nori says the broader goal is to collect varied real-world demonstrations for general-purpose robot policies. Each deployed A3 can produce examples of how people teach robots to move through different rooms, handle different objects and complete tasks with different layouts.

That data strategy makes the $1,688 price a distribution decision as much as a hardware claim. Cheaper machines can reach more developers, homes and small businesses, expanding the pool of demonstrations available to improve later software.

According to the YC profile, Nori had recorded more than $350,000 in sales during its first six weeks and deployed one robot. The sales figure is company-supplied, and the profile reports booked demand alongside a single delivered machine. Production and support through the fall shipment window will show whether Li's cost discipline can survive contact with customers.

For now, Nori has moved the upfront price of a two-armed mobile robot closer to a high-end computer than a car. Buyers receive affordable hardware, open software and a share of the remaining robotics work.