Eden Robotics is building wheel-based robots that charge $10/hour to work in factories — no robots sold, just labor

Eden Robotics

Eden Robotics builds general-purpose wheeled robots for manufacturing and warehousing, and it doesn't sell them. Stamatis Floratos charges $10 per hour for actual robot operating time — no hardware sale, no monthly lease, just a labor invoice customers can understand.

That pricing framing is deliberate. Floratos says potential customers have no mental model for a robot lease, but they understand paying a worker by the hour. The $10/hour rate is billed only when the robot is running, with minimum commitments sized to justify leaving the hardware on-site.

“We're not selling these robots. So we're selling the labor. And in fact, we're not even leasing them on a monthly basis. We're charging per hour. So we're charging $10 per hour, which is actually found that customers love that idea much more than they love the lease idea because they have no mental framework — they have the mental framework of a human worker.”

The hardware choices

The robot is wheeled, not legged, with two shoulder-mounted arms and grippers rather than dexterous hands. Floratos argues grippers handle more than 80% of industrial tasks. The wheel-versus-legs trade-off is explicit: legs offer more flexibility in uneven environments, but cost significantly more to build and consume far more energy. Half the robot's chassis is battery, the other half compute.

On current hardware, a standard car battery runs the unit for 12 hours. A custom battery design Floratos describes pushes that to 20 hours, with the remaining time used for optimized charging so the robot rarely stops outright.

Durability and the depreciation question

The most common concern with humanoid-adjacent robots is actuator wear and maintenance cost relative to a human worker earning $30,000–$40,000 a year. Floratos puts useful actuator life at roughly three years, noting the robot ran for 10 hours at YC's alumni demo day without a hardware fault. He distinguishes Eden's actuators from units like the Unit 3 robot, which he says is known for overheating quickly.

Because Eden owns the hardware and charges per hour, maintenance costs sit with Eden rather than the customer — which is structurally what makes the labor-as-a-service model work as a pitch to risk-averse factory operators.

Funding

A raise is close but not yet closed, per Floratos.