Cartwheel Robotics

Cartwheel Robotics was a small Nevada company set up around 2022 by Scott LaValley, who spent seven years as a hardware lead at Boston Dynamics (Petman, early Atlas), moved with it to Google, and then led Project Kiwi at Walt Disney Imagineering from 2016 to 2021. His sister Samantha was co-founder. The premise was that industrial humanoids are frightening and a home robot has to be a character first, with a big head, soft skin and toddler proportions.

The company came out of stealth in early 2025 with Yogi, a compact bipedal companion robot. In September 2025 LaValley told The Register that a debut was planned for December 2025 or March 2026, with a slow rollout to universities and healthcare pilots and consumer sales perhaps four years away. In October 2025 the listed investor Humanoid Global said Cartwheel had opened a seed round and was building a facility in Reno, Nevada.

The capital did not come. On 6 February 2026 LaValley announced on LinkedIn that Cartwheel was shutting down, saying it had not found the right partner to bridge the gap between progress and potential. By his account a team of seven built the walking prototype in under a year on about USD 3 million of outside money. No Yogi was ever sold.