OS3, a two-person robotics startup out of San Francisco, builds HALE, a semi-humanoid robot for physical labor that pairs its own hardware with its own control models. Co-founders Rishabh Chanana and Chris Hailey took HALE from an undisclosed hospitality pilot to a public Y Combinator launch in August 2026, and developer units are now open for preorder.
HALE, the semi-humanoid labor robot built by San Francisco startup OS3, got public pricing for the first time in September 2026: separate rates for hospitality deployment and for developer purchase or lease. OS3 introduced HALE through a Y Combinator launch in August 2026 and says shipments start Fall 2026, still backed only by Y Combinator with no other funding disclosed.
Founded: 2025 · HQ: San Francisco, CA, USA · Team: 1-10 · CEO: Rishabh Chanana · Funding: Y Combinator (Summer 2026 batch); additional seed investors mentioned but not publicly named or sized
About OS3
OS3 Inc. was founded in San Francisco in 2025 by Rishabh Chanana and Chris Hailey, and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch under partner Gustaf Alstromer. Chanana built his first computer at age 10, wrote his first line of code at 13, and decided a month later he wanted to start a robotics company, a thread he carried through graduate study in Robotics and AI at UC San Diego, NLP research alongside Harvard Medical School and Georgia Tech, and a stint training large language models at ServiceNow. Hailey, the company's co-founder and CTO, studied computer science at USC on a Presidential Merit scholarship, worked as a software engineer on Coinbase's asset addition team where his work touched more than $19 billion in trading volume, and turned a YC hackathon project into a venture generating $10K in monthly recurring revenue before OS3. The company is a two-person team as of mid-2026, run out of a hardware lab in San Francisco that the founders describe on their site as 'soldering in SF.'
OS3 builds a semi-humanoid robot it names HALE 1.0 (Human Aligned Life Enhancing), with a stated approach of controlling both the hardware and the intelligence layer in-house rather than buying off-the-shelf robot bodies and bolting on software. The company's site frames its philosophy directly: 'Every human starts with the same body and intelligence, then learns by living. So do our robots.' HALE 1.0 carries two arms, rated at roughly 5 kilograms of payload each, on a telescoping torso that extends from the ground to 6 feet, now paired with an omnidirectional base for mobility, sensed with camera and LiDAR, with collision avoidance, automatic power cutoff, and an emergency stop built in; a person can start or stop a task from a touchscreen on the robot itself or a mobile app. Its training pipeline has two stages: the control model is pretrained on 150,000 hours of internet and egocentric human video spanning more than 2,000 distinct real-world tasks, then fine-tuned with reinforcement learning directly on OS3's own hardware, running on actuators OS3 builds itself rather than sourcing from a third party. OS3's own August 2026 Y Combinator launch post described a technical report on the model as 'coming soon,' pending evaluation runs.
As of September 2026, OS3 has moved from an undisclosed pilot to public pricing and open preorders. Hospitality deployments, HALE 1.0's first application, are listed on OS3's own site starting at $2.50 an hour. Developer units are priced at $14,995 outright or $1,800 a month to lease, against a $99 refundable preorder deposit; OS3's Y Combinator launch post states shipments begin Fall 2026. The company still presents the robot and its software as one integrated hardware-plus-intelligence platform rather than a family of separately named products beyond the HALE 1.0 name itself.
OS3 has now disclosed its revenue model directly on its own site: hospitality customers pay a deployment rate starting at $2.50 an hour, while developers can buy a unit outright for $14,995 or lease one for $1,800 a month against a $99 refundable preorder deposit. No customer count, contract length, or revenue figures have been released beyond the pricing itself.
Funding details for OS3 remain undisclosed beyond Y Combinator. The company's own site now credits it simply as 'Backed by Y Combinator,' with no other investor named or sized, and OS3 is a member of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, which carries YC's standard early-stage investment. No seed round size, valuation, or additional venture investor has been confirmed in public sources as of this refresh. This is common for a YC company just past its batch and should not be read as an absence of investor interest, only as an absence of public disclosure.
OS3's team consists of its two named co-founders, with no additional leadership, engineers, or researchers publicly named as of this refresh. The company operates out of San Francisco with no disclosed additional offices. Given the team size, hiring is presumably a near-term priority, though OS3 has not published a public careers page or listed open roles.
OS3 describes itself as 'deployment-focused robotics research, across hardware and intelligence,' positioning its research agenda around closing the loop between physical hardware design and the control models that run on it, rather than treating either as a separate problem. Its technical bet, pretraining on human video before reinforcement learning on real hardware, mirrors an approach used by several other embodied-AI labs but is distinguished here by OS3 building its own robot chassis and actuators rather than adapting a third-party humanoid platform. No published research papers, safety framework, or responsible-scaling-style policy were found for the company; its own August 2026 launch post says a technical report is still pending.
OS3 competes in the emerging humanoid and semi-humanoid labor robotics category alongside better-funded and more established players such as Figure AI, 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, and Sanctuary AI. Those competitors have raised substantially larger rounds and, in several cases, have multi-year head starts on hardware iteration and large-scale piloting. OS3's stated differentiation is tight in-house control over both the robot body and the training pipeline from day one, now paired with public pricing and open preorders ahead of several larger rivals, and an explicit focus on hospitality-sector physical labor as its first real-world proving ground rather than warehouse or industrial logistics tasks that several rivals have targeted first. Whether that hardware-and-model co-design approach can scale against better-capitalized competitors as shipments begin is not yet publicly demonstrated.
No EU AI Act classification, GDPR posture, export control disclosure, or other regulatory statement was found for OS3, which is expected for a two-person, pre-scale hardware company. As a physical robotics company rather than a software or API vendor, standard SaaS compliance certifications such as SOC 2 or HIPAA are not applicable to its current business.
OS3's near-term trajectory will likely be shaped by how Fall 2026 shipments go, whether it discloses a funding round beyond Y Combinator, and whether the hospitality deployment expands into a broader commercial rollout or additional verticals.
Mission
Deployment-focused robotics research, across hardware and intelligence: robots for the real world.
Products
- HALE 1.0 (Semi-humanoid labor robot: two 5kg-payload arms, telescoping torso, omnidirectional base, camera + LiDAR; developer units $14,995 or $1,800/mo lease, hospitality deployment from $2.50/hr): https://os3robotics.com
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
What is OS3 and what do they build?
OS3 Inc. is a San Francisco robotics startup that builds HALE (Human Aligned Life Enhancing), a semi-humanoid robot for physical labor. Rather than buying an off-the-shelf robot body, the company designs its own telescoping-torso, omnidirectional-base hardware and trains its own control models to run on it. HALE is already deployed in a hospitality pilot, and OS3 introduced public pricing for both hospitality and developer customers in September 2026. OS3 is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 cohort.
Who founded OS3 and who runs the company?
OS3 was co-founded by Rishabh Chanana, who leads product and research, and Chris Hailey, the company's CTO and a former Coinbase software engineer. No additional co-founders or executives are publicly disclosed, and the two-person team works out of a San Francisco hardware lab the founders describe as 'soldering in SF.'
How much funding has OS3 raised?
OS3 has not stated a specific dollar amount for any funding round. Its website names only Y Combinator as a backer, without a size or valuation, and the company belongs to Y Combinator's Summer 2026 cohort, which includes YC's standard early-stage investment. No other venture investor has surfaced in public sources. That is ordinary for a company only months past its YC batch and doesn't necessarily mean investor interest is lacking, just that OS3 hasn't announced anything further.
What does HALE 1.0 cost and when does it ship?
Developer pricing for HALE became public in September 2026: buyers can pay $14,995 up front or lease at $1,800 monthly, secured by a $99 refundable deposit ahead of delivery. Businesses that want HALE for hospitality work instead pay by usage, from $2.50 an hour, rather than buying a unit outright. OS3's own Y Combinator launch post puts the first shipments in Fall 2026, with preorders open now.
Who are OS3's main competitors?
OS3 is a very early entrant next to far better funded humanoid and semi-humanoid labor-robotics companies, among them Figure AI and 1X Technologies, most of which have multi-year hardware and piloting head starts. OS3's pitch against that field is controlling its hardware, actuators and training pipeline end to end, a bet it is now backing with live preorders and public pricing that several larger rivals have not matched yet, plus an initial focus on hospitality labor rather than the warehouse and logistics tasks bigger competitors chase first.