Bear Adds Humanoids to Robot Lineup With Acquisition of Kinisi – The Spoon

Bear Robotics is looking for a helping hand as it seeks to strengthen its position in the food robotics space and beyond. It just got one by acquiring Kinisi Robotics, a startup that makes wheeled humanoid robots.

The company announced this week that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kinisi, a Bristol-based startup building the KR1, a robot that can pick, place, sort, and move objects across a variety of settings, including warehouses, factories, logistics operations, and hospitality environments.

Longtime Spoon readers will remember that Bear got its start as a project by ex-Googler and restaurant owner John Ha, who built a robot to shuttle dishes and bus tables at his Northern California restaurant. From those early days, Ha grew the company to the point where it has shipped more than 16,000 service robots into restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and other places.

With Kinisi, Bear adds a robot that brings a completely new dimension, one that includes arms, hands, grippers, and the AI needed to let robots do more than navigate a space. In other words, Bear is adding serious manipulation capabilities to its offerings, something that will not only expand what it can do in food-related industries, but will also enable it to move well beyond them.

The deal also reunites Bear with Brennand Pierce, one of Bear’s early cofounders, who later founded Kinisi. In a LinkedIn post announcing the deal, Pierce said Kinisi actually started inside Bear’s Redwood City headquarters, where he used Bear’s machine shop and occasionally “borrowed” sensors and a robot base to get the company moving.

Ha wrote about the deal on his LinkedIn, talking both about the expansion in capabilities and how gratifying it is to bring one of his original cofounders back into the fold.

“The simple version — our robots have always been great at moving things around. Now they’re getting hands. They can actually pick things up, sort them, and do the work.

And this part’s personal. Kinisi’s founder, Brennand Pierce, was one of Bear’s original co-founders. Bren — welcome home.”

Bear’s announcement highlights Kinisi’s Vision-Language-Action model, or VLA, which helps connect what a robot sees and is asked to do with the physical actions it takes. Bear’s technology has worked well in structured service environments, but adding VLA capability could help its robots move into messier, less predictable environments by giving them a better understanding of how to act in the physical world.

Kinisi also brings along its own Robot Foundation Model, or RFM, a generalized AI model trained to give robots broader manipulation skills across different tasks and environments.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the robotics space has seen a massive growth in interest around humanoid robotics, in large part because these robots could potentially be plugged into existing human-centric work environments rather than requiring companies to redesign spaces around custom-built robots, which is often the case for back-of-house food robots. Bear’s robots have already established themselves as easy-fit robots for existing service environments, but now, with general-purpose humanoids as part of its arsenal, my guess is we’ll see an acceleration in demand.

Not mentioned is how LG plays into the equation. Back in early 2025, LG became a majority owner of Bear Robotics, but the South Korean technology and appliance giant has continued to let Bear operate independently. With Kinisi now in the fold, it will be interesting to see whether LG remains hands-off or whether Bear’s move into humanoids becomes part of a larger robotics strategy for the company.