Colin Angle spent 30 years building robots that clean your floors. Now he wants to create one that keeps you company. When I first heard that pitch, not gonna lie, I rolled my eyes a little. The companion robots sector is a graveyard of good intentions. But the more I sat with what Angle is actually doing with his new company, Familiar Machines & Magic, the more it started to make sense to me.
Angle is the co-founder of iRobot, the company behind the Roomba, which put 50 million household robots into homes worldwide. After iRobot’s failed sale to Amazon, he stepped down as CEO in 2024. What he’s built since then is a dog-sized robot called a Familiar — a deliberately unidentifiable creature that resembles something between a bear, a barn owl, and a dog. It has movable eyebrows, ears, and eyes. It purrs. It nudges you to go to bed. According to IEEE Spectrum, Angle built it around what he calls “emotional work,” the kind of presence that keeps people from feeling alone.
That’s a big swing. But here’s why I think he might actually be onto something.
Why companion robots keep failing (and how Familiar is different
Bugs weren’t the problem. Early companion robots failed because they were cold.
Past contenders include: Jibo, discontinued in 2019. Vector by Anki. Amazon’s Astro. Sony’s Aibo, which was sweet but never more than a novelty. These products had hardware and software. What they didn’t have was emotional weight. They felt like gadgets wearing a personality as a costume — awkward and ultimately destined for a closet. Angle studied this. The Familiar doesn’t talk (a deliberate choice). It communicates through body language, expression, and sound. “If this is a toy, we’ve failed,” Angle told The Verge. “If this is a creature that you want in your world, then we’ve knocked it out of the park.”
The lonliness epidemic and AI companion robots
The numbers on loneliness right now are genuinely hard to look at. According to Cigna’s 2025 Loneliness in America report, 57% of Americans report feeling lonely. The American Psychiatric Association found one in three Americans feels lonely every single week. And in a cruel irony, technology tops the list of what people blame for their isolation.
Angle’s answer isn’t another screen. It’s a physical robot that gets up and walks around your home, follows you room to room, and nudges you off your phone. “If your Familiar gets you up and out of your room and walking around—that’s a real way to try to address isolation and loneliness,” he said. Is that a guaranteed fix? No. But it’s at least engaging with the right problem.
A shirt towards tech products with cute design
Design researcher Tobias van Schneider has written about what he calls the Kawaiization of product design—a deliberate move away from cold minimalism toward emotionally resonant, cute aesthetics. Research backs this up: cuteness genuinely promotes calm and positive emotional states. Duolingo built an entire brand identity on an aggressive little owl. The Familiar takes its cue from a similar logic. Its, not-quite-any-animal design is intentional. That way, there’s no debate about what it should/shouldn’t be able to do, no disappointment when it can’t fetch your slippers. Just an open door to connection.
The companion robot market is already projected to surpass $2.4 billion by end of 2025, per market research cited by IoT Marketing. We just might be entering an era where AI that lives with you is just as viable a category as AI that works for you.
The Familiar won’t be available until next year at the earliest, and pricing is still vague. There are real questions left to answer—will people actually bond with it, or will it end up in a closet? And can emotionally soft AI be a product category or just a very expensive experiment?
But we’re at a strange moment: lonelier than we’ve ever been, exhausted by screens, and increasingly aware that the technology meant to connect us has done the opposite. If there was ever a time for a robot that just… sits with you, that might be now. I get why someone is trying to build it.