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A robot that folds your laundry is the kind of idea that sells itself. Just ask Syncere, a five-person startup that secured more than 1,000 preorders for its Lume robot with nothing but a simulated concept video. That video, which racked up more than four million views on X over the summer, shows a pair of bedside lamps transforming into robotic arms that calmly fold a pile of laundry on the bed. (The video itself does not acknowledge that it’s a computer-generated rendering.) Syncere is taking preorders for $200or $2,000 to be first in linewith plans to launch next summer. Introducing Lume, the robotic lamp.The first robot designed to fit naturally into your home and help with chores, starting with laundry folding.If youre looking for help and want to avoid the privacy and safety concerns of humanoids in your home, pre-order now. pic.twitter.com/2JmU0qXUIV— Aaron Tan (@aaronistan) July 28, 2025 “The idea is that you just dump your laundry on the bed and then you walk away . . . and when you come back, it’s as if the laundry on the bed magically folded and sorted itself, CEO Aaron Tan tells Fast Company. Automating housework has been a dream going back at least as far the invention of the dishwasher and its 1893 debut. Although most of the current robot revolution has focused on the workplace and the prospect of working side-by-side with a humanoid, the response to Syncere’s video and that of Figure’s humanoid folding towels last month has shown there’s a lot of interest in domestic robots that could take over tedious chores most people hate. And laundry’s got to be at or near the top of that list. In this Premium piece, you’ll learn: How Syncere came up with the concept of robot arms that double as lamps The key technologies that Tan says enable robotic laundry-folding to be possible What happened to the buzzy laundry-folding bots of the 2010s Which training data and techniques Syncere is relying on to teach its robot how to fluff and fold The hurdles the startup faces to realize its vision From bot-of-all-trades to clothes horse Syncere didnt start out with laundry-folding robots in mind. Having earned PhDs in robotics from University of Toronto, Tan and co-founder Angus Fung originally designed a mobile robot with an arm to perform a variety of tasks, from cleaning and bed-making to food delivery. To test their ideas, they found work as housekeepers at a Marriott in the Toronto area, aided by a manager who was willing to let them experiment. But when they started bringing their robots into peoples homes for testing, they started getting pushback. The idea of installing an industrial-size robot in the home didn’t sit well with people, who either feared for their safety or weren’t sure where they’d put it. “What people wanted was a way to get rid of their chores, but they want their homes looking beautiful, not having to worry about getting run over or colliding with these large machines,” Tan says. That led to the idea of a robot that focused only on folding laundry and could fit more naturally into home environments. Syncere’s new plan calls for a pair of six-axis robot arms that stand about six feet tall, working as regular lamps when they’re not folding clothes. They’ll come equipped with cameras and a board of similar specs to Nvidias Jetson Orin developer kit (though Tan declines to name the specific processor), with data processed on-device. While folding times can vary, Tan claims that Syncere’s robot arms can fold a garment in as quickly as 5 to 10 seconds. “We envision an average load of laundry to take less than two hours to do,” he says. A history of unfulfilled promise Syncere isn’t the first startup to build buzz by promising to eliminate one of the most tedious household chores. In the late 2010s, a couple of rival startups called Foldimate and Seven Dreamers became fixtures at trade shows such as CES, showing off their ability to fold garments with little to no assistance. Foldimate promised a sub-$1,000 price tag, but required users to manually feed clothing into the machine, while Seven Dreamers’ Laundroid robot aimed to fold clothing autonomously in a $16,000 box the size of a large armoire. Neither product made it to market. Foldimate’s website quietly went offline a few years ago without explanation, and the company behind Laundroid filed for bankruptcy in 2019 despite raising $100 million, with CEO Shin Sakane citing problems with mass production. Reached via LinkedIn, Sakane said he still hopes to bring Laundroid to life in the future, but said he isn’t working on it now and didn’t respond to further requests for comment. Emails to an address believed to be associated with Foldimate founder Gal Rozov went unanswered, as did a request for comment with the company he now works for. The AI eyes have it Tan says the barriers to building a laundry folding robot are lower than they were five or 10 years ago. Robotic arms and actuators are cheaper and easier to acquire, but more importantly, AI and computer vision technologies are much more advanced. “It quite simply comes down to the advances in AI,” Tan says. “The advances in computer vision that happened in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and most recently with these large foundation models . . . things are a lot different now.” To start training its robot, for instance, Syncere used open-source vision-language-action models, a concept that Google pioneered in 2023 that allows robots to understand and take action on what they’re seeing. Syncere is also using large language models to help describe garments to the robot so it can understand what they are and how to treat them. David Held, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, says recent advancements such as vision-language-action models only provide a starting point. Syncere would still have to train the robot to do the actual folding, and that’s going to take a lot of time and effort. Training the robot Currently, one of the best ways to train this kind of robot is through teleoperation, or “puppetry” as Held calls it. Essentially, the trainer uses a remote control or joysticks to manipulate the robot’s arms and fold laundry manually. Through this process the robot eventually learns how to handle different types of clothing. Tan confirmed that Syncere is using teleoperation to train its robot, but Held says that it’ll take a lot of data to account for things like crumpled up shirts or an inside-out pair of pants. It’s unclear how much data will be necessary to make a home robot work reliably. “Companies that are working on this problem and trying to release this as a product are betting that they can collect enough data, and train a big enough network, to handle all of that variability,” Held says. “I think that’s a big unknown right now, whether that’s going to pan out, or whether we’re going to need other ways to augment that data.” More obstacles ahead Assuming Syncere can train its Lume robot to fold a pile of laundry from start to finish, a more pedestrian obstacle remains: It still needs to figure out how to manufacture at scale a product that’s never been made before. Even if laundry-folding robots are more feasible now, that doesn’t mean they’re easy to make. Previous laundry-folding robot startups have fizzled out before shipping a single unit, and Syncere has yet to show evidence of a working prototype. For now, Syncere isn’t thinking much about it. Tan says the company plans to build every individual robot in-house for at least the first year. That won’t be sustainable for long, but he says the approach will allow the startup to “keep the iteration cycle tight” in conjunction with early backers. (Note that neither Tan nor his co-founder Tan have any prior experience shipping consumer hardware.) In other words, those who put down $200 or $2,000 now are essentially signing up to be beta testers, a point that is not made clear on Syncere’s order pages. Meanwhile, Syncere may need sources of funding beyond what it’s collected from 1,000-plus preorders, and its financing situation is unclear. Tan cited a16z as “one of our investors,” and its website refers to having “closed our funding round,” but it’s technically part of the a16z speedrun accelerator program, not one of its main portfolio companies. Syncere has also received funding from the incubator Founders, Inc and is working out of its San Francisco office. Tan says Syncere plans to keep its early customers in the loop with a steady drip of content, including an eventual look at a prototype. Syncere led with a rendered concept video, he says, “because we wanted to paint the vision clearer.” But it’s worth remembering That strategy has worked to an extent, in that Syncere has gradually raised its waitlist price from $50 to $200 off the success of its viral video. “We’ve slowly increased the price as we’ve exceeded our original expectations,” Tan says. Now it just needs to meet the expectations of folks who’ve been hearing about laundry-folding robots for close to a decade now, only to have come up empty-handed. With recent advancements in AI and computer vision, laundry-folding robots are more feasible than they’ve ever been. The question is whether Syncere will be the one to finally deliver them.
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E-Commerce
The modern city is a paradox. Designed to bring people together, it increasingly keeps us apart, stranded in traffic, saddled with debt, and choked by air pollution. The root cause isnt a mystery. We built our cities around cars, not people. This design wasnt accidental. It was the result of a century-long entanglement between public infrastructure and private interests, what we call the car-industrial complex. Cars were sold to Americans as symbols of freedom and progress. In reality, they’ve become financial traps, consuming vast portions of household budgets while gutting public space and mobility options for everyone. Car-centric planning has hollowed out our cities. Zoning regulations, freeways, and cheap fuel gave rise to sprawling suburbs and isolated communities, dependent on personal vehicles for even the most basic tasks. Its a system that punishes the poor, marginalizes the elderly and disabled, and makes public life thinner and more precarious. The car promised freedom, and delivered debt, pollution, and dependence. Meanwhile, local governments, seduced by auto industry lobbying and federal subsidies, doubled down on road-building and car-friendly development. The result is a vicious cycle: more cars mean more roads; more roads mean more sprawl; more sprawl means more cars. And all of it costs taxpayers dearly. Cities are now stuck maintaining bloated road networks while struggling to fund basic services like public transit, schools, and housing. Reallocating space So how do we begin to reverse this? First, we must redesign our cities around people, not cars. This begins with reallocating space. Cars are the most spatially inefficient form of transport ever invented. They sit idle 95% of the time, yet take up 50% or more of urban space in some cities. The solution? Reduce car lanes. Convert parking lots into housing, green space, or local commerce. Make streets walkable and bikeable by default, not as an afterthought. This can be done and is already being done in cities from Barcelona to Bogota. Second, we need to invest in public transit, not just as a social good, but as core infrastructure for economic resilience. This means buses, trains, but also microtransit, demand-responsive services, and protected cycling infrastructure. Public mobility must be convenient, affordable, and desirable. A truly resilient city isnt one where everyone can afford a car, its one where nobody has to have one one to thrive. Third, housing and mobility must be planned together. For decades, we built homes far from jobs, schools, and groceries, and then told people to drive. Inverting that logic is essential. Cities should incentivize mixed-use, infill development and eliminate minimum parking requirements that bake car dependency into every building project. Fourth, we must confront the car-industrial complex at its core: finance. Car debt in the U.S. now totals more than $1.6 trillion. Thats more than all outstanding student loan debt. Eighty percent of new cars and 35% of used cars are purchased with loans, many predatory, high-interest, and longer than the expected life of the vehicle. This isn’t mobility, its a form of economic capture. Governments cant fix this by tinkering at the edges. Subsidizing electric cars or building a few charging stations wont solve the deeper problem: the financial architecture of car dependency. We need policies that actively disincentivize car ownership and use, congestion pricing, car-free zones, and removing subsidies that make driving artificially cheap. At the same time, we must support families through affordable alternatives, dense, walkable neighborhoods, better public schools, and reliable transit. Fifth, we must reimagine how we measure success. For decades, traffic engineers and city planners envisaged good planning in terms of how fast and efficiently traffic could flow. We need to shift that metric toward human flourishing and what makes a city liveable in the 21st century. Is it safe to walk your child to school? Can a teenager get to a job without a car? Are parks and clinics accessible without driving? If not, the system is failing. Not a dream Reversing car-centric design is not a utopian dream. Cities around the world are already doing it. Paris is removing 70,000 parking spaces to make room for bikes and trees. Barcelona is expanding its network of superblocks that prioritize pedestrians and eliminate through-traffic. Oslo removed cars entirely from its city center and saw foot traffic, and local business, surge. Cities in the Global South are pioneering new forms of green micormobility, such as Jakarta where the government has set a target of electrifying 2.1 million motor cyles by the end of 2025 These changes we need in cities arent just about mobility. Theyre about public health, economic equity, and climate resilience. Theyre about repairing the social fabric that cars have slowly unraveled. And most importantly, theyre about freedom, not the isolated, debt-ridden version sold by car commercials, but the real kind: the freedom to move, to breathe clean air, to live in a thriving community.Adapted from Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Relationship with Cars, by Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay. Copyright 2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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E-Commerce
For the last 17 months, Antonio Gianfrancesco has been working on the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Islanda sprawling wind farm that was designed to have 65 turbines and generate enough power for 350,000 homes. On August 22, Gianfrancesco was at home when he was awakened by a phone call. It was my coworker, who said that they had randomly stopped the Revolution project, he says. Honestly, I was pretty shocked about it. It came out of nowhere. And I was pretty uneasy because I didnt know if I was going to have a job in a weekand I still dont know if Im going to have a job in a day or a month. Everythings up in the air. The stop-work order came from the Trump administration, which cited unspecified national security concerns and told rsted, the Danish co-developer running the project, to pause everything. (A national security expert and former naval officer says that security concerns were already well vetted by the Department of Defense and others before the project was approved, and he points out that energy security is also a critical part of national security.) Attendees during a media tour of the Revolution Wind construction hub at the Port of Providence in Providence, Rhode Island, on Thursday, June 13, 2024. [Photo: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg/Getty Images] Trump has opposed the wind industry ever since he failed to stop a wind farm near one of his golf courses in Scotland in 2006. After reportedly promising fossil fuel executives last year that he would deliver their policy wish list if they donated $1 billion to his presidential campaign, Trump stepped up attacks on renewable energy after taking office. (Fossil fuel companies didnt give $1 billion, but donated $450 million to influence Trump and Congress, according to one report.) When he took office in January, Trump issued an executive order to stop new leasing for wind projects and fast-track oil and gas production on federal land. In April, he issued a stop-work order on the Empire Wind 1 offshore wind farm in New York, though he backed down after advocacy efforts from New York politicians and labor unions. In July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended tax credits for new renewable energy projects that start construction after July 2026; it also added new restrictions on foreign parts that will make it harder for projects to qualify. (Another executive order called for agencies to tighten the definition of what it means to “start construction.”) Trump also said federal waters would no longer be eligible for offshore wind development. This month, Trump told agencies to step up attacks against the wind industry. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the Health and Human Services Department would be studying electromagnetic fields from wind farms, although previous studies have not found any health risks. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pulled $679 million in funding for infrastructure to support offshore wind power. All of this is happening while Trump argues that there is an energy emergencyand wind projects like Revolution Wind were poised to begin providing power. For the workers, its baffling. Revolution Wind is 80% complete. It could have been finished as soon as December and be powering the grid by next year, if everything had continued on schedule. Residents would have saved money on electric bills. After around two years of construction work on the project, Gianfrancesco says, Its kind of a slap in the face. Gianfrancesco, like hundreds of other workers on the project, went through hours of training to do specialized work on the project. His role, as a balance of power technician, includes safety inspections of anchor points, basic repairs, and other work on the massive 873-foot-tall turbines. Prior to his specialized training, he worked on building the concrete platforms that support the wind turbines. Until the project was frozen, workers rotated in weeks-long shifts on a large vessel 15 miles offshore. Gianfrancesco would work long hours for two weeks, and then have two weeks off. (Others spent even longer periods on the ship, in six-week shifts.) He happened to be on land when the work stopped, but some of his coworkers were stuck on board, unable to do anything but wait. “Some of the guys go to the gym four times a day,” one worker told The Wall Street Journal. When we spoke, Gianfrancesco was temporarily offshore again at Sunrise Wind, another rsted project off the coast of Long Island. But because that project is at a much earlier stage, theres little to do. A lot of people are just sitting out here, he says. Theres no progress. rsted sued the government on September 4, arguing that the stop-work order was illegal. The states of Rhode Island and Connecticut, which would both get electricity from the project, joined the suit. “This kind of erratic and reckless governing is blatantly illegal, and we’re suing to stop it,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 workers are in limbofrom union carpenters to electricians. If there are layoffs, “I’m not sure if I would be able to pay the rent,” Gianfrancesco says. “Other people here support their families. I support my sisters. The fact that it’s all up in the air is a strange feeling. “There were so many trainings that I had to do in the course of two years to be out here,” he adds. “It just feels like it’s all for nothing, especially since 80% of the project is done. And I was proud to be working on Revolution. It’s in the nameit’s revolutionary.” The project would have been only the fourth offshore wind farm in the U.S., and the largest one by far.
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E-Commerce
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