Jibo Raises $25.3 Million for Hotly Anticipated Home Robot

An upcoming $599 home robot called Jibo promises to learn people’s faces and recognize their presence, play with kids, act like a personal assistant and take group photos.

At least thousands of people like the idea of buying a seemingly sentient and social robot for the price of a nice tablet. Some $2.3 million worth of Jibos were pre-ordered in an Indiegogo campaign before the maker of the device, also called Jibo, cut them off in hopes it can meet its goal of getting the robots to buyers at the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016.

Now Boston-based Jibo — the subject of a recent profile by Re/code writer James Temple — is announcing it’s raised $25.3 million in Series A financing from RRE Ventures, CRV and others.

Jibo board member Steve Chambers is stepping into the CEO role and Jibo founder Cynthia Breazeal, the MIT robotics pioneer, is moving to be the company’s chief scientist. Chambers, who was formerly president of Nuance Communications, downplayed the switch to Re/code as a matter of “the external catching up to the internal.”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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