Why we invested in Dynamic Creatures

Every wave of robotics has needed a proving ground before it got a market. Industrial robotics proved itself on the assembly line. Defence robotics is proving itself now, across Europe's rearmament programmes and around critical infrastructure. Both sit in our resilience portfolio. The third wave is consumer and experience robotics, and it will prove itself in queues, lobbies and check-in counters long before it reaches anyone's living room. That proof has to come from characters people actually want to meet.

That’s why we invested.

The problem

Consumer robotics does not have a capability problem. It has an acceptance problem. People will not put a machine that moves on its own into their home until they have met one somewhere else and it went well. That first meeting has to happen where somebody else carries the responsibility, where the robot is staffed, insured and surrounded by people who came out expecting something unusual.

Most of the industry is working on the other end of this. The dominant bet in robotics is a general-purpose humanoid that replaces human labour. That bet requires the hardest technical problem in the field to be solved before the first unit earns anything, and it reaches consumers last.

Today a theme park or a hotel lobby has two options, and both show significant shortcomings: animatronics are bolted to the floor and run the same sequence for whoever is standing in front of them. Service robots complete tasks, usually guidance or telepresence. Neither can walk up to one child in a queue and react to that child.

What makes the alternative possible now is the interaction layer: generative AI, reinforcement learning in simulation and cheaper hardware moved robots from executing a sequence to reading a situation.

The market

The world's 25 most-visited theme parks drew close to 246 million visits in 2024, up 2.4% on the year. Behind them sit hotels, resorts, casinos, museums, cruise ships and live venues, all of them paying heavily for experience.

There is no credible market-size figure for interactive character robots because the category does not exist yet. That is the point: the spending is already there, the supply is not. Further out, the same capability opens adjacencies in care and assisted living, a market we already spend time on as European populations age.

The solution

Dynamic Creatures builds mobile character robots for entertainment and hospitality brands. They move through a guest environment, read the context of an encounter, and respond to an individual instead of running a sequence.

The company works in two directions: it extends existing robotics platforms into characters, and it builds fully original robots around a specific brand, story and environment. Underneath sits SnowJay, its integrated AI and robotics platform, combining learning-based control, real-time perception, behavioural programming, character design and costuming.

The commercial model is unusual for hardware. Platform-based characters deploy in months rather than the timelines a custom build demands, and leasing removes the upfront capital commitment. An operator can treat a character as an experiment rather than a capital project.

Dynamic Creatures is Boston Dynamics' official entertainment and hospitality partner and is already working with a large theme park and retailer.

Why we're convinced

Our conviction rests on the founder, the entry point, and what the deployments produce.

The team. CEO Marc Theermann joined Boston Dynamics as chief strategy officer in March 2021, when Spot had just become the company's first commercial robot. By the time he left, Spot was in the field in more than 35 countries and his responsibilities covered commercialisation across Spot, Stretch and Atlas. Before robotics he spent two decades in high-growth companies, including AdMeld, sold to Google for $400m, and Millennial Media, sold to AOL and Verizon for $238m. In robotics, founders usually come out of a lab and learn commercialisation afterwards. A founder who has already taken robots through safety, customer acceptance and field service arrives with the part most teams spend years learning. CTO Farbod Farshidian was a research leader at the Robotics and AI Institute, with work behind Atlas's agile behaviour and high-speed quadrupedal movement.

The entry point. Guest environments create revenue from day one. They are the one place where an operator will pay for a character before anyone has proven a return, because experience is already a line in the budget. That means Dynamic Creatures earns revenue during the years the rest of the category spends waiting for consumer hardware economics to arrive.

The data. The long-term advantage sits with whoever accumulates the most real-world data on how people behave around a robot: what makes someone stop, film, come back. In our view, a better model with no deployments loses to a worse model with real interactions behind it. Character deployments produce those interactions while producing revenue.

We are proud to invest as the only German investor alongside Eniac Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Sunshine Lake and BlueGrass Ventures, with angels including Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics. Industrial and defence robotics are already in our portfolio. Dynamic Creatures is the third wave.

That’s why we invested.