Picture a half-finished apartment, walls still raw and dusty, with no crew in sight — yet the finishing work is moving ahead anyway. A compact robot glides from room to room, maps the space it has never seen before, and sets about finishing the walls: compound on, surface sanded smooth, primer applied, all to a professional standard. That is OG-1, the flagship robot from Origin, a physical-AI company building what it calls the world’s first general-purpose construction robot.
Origin emerged from stealth on 15 October 2026 with $20 million in total funding, co-led by Accel and Zacua Ventures, with participation from Unilazer Ventures, Schema Ventures and Z21, alongside angel investors from Anduril, Skild AI, 1X and Tesla. The company says the capital will go towards deploying OG-1, expanding its robot fleet and running large-scale customer pilots in the US and Europe — including with two of the largest drywall-finishing contractors in the US, with further pilots scheduled in Germany, Sweden, France and Saudi Arabia.
The wall, finished by a robot
OG-1’s first trade is wall finishing, one of the most repetitive, dusty and skill-dependent jobs inside any building. The company says the robot autonomously completes the whole wall-finishing workflow without human intervention: it applies compound, sands the surface and primes the wall to a professional finish. The company says it works at three times human speed while delivering human-level quality — and that its robots have already completed more than 100,000 square feet across 5,000 hours of work on live sites.
The machine itself is built for real rooms, not showrooms. It moves on a three-wheeled platform with a 360-degree view of its surroundings, fits through the doorways and tight corners of an ordinary interior, and can work at heights of up to 14 feet. For contact-heavy work like sanding, it uses real-time force control to hold consistent pressure against the wall, so the finish stays even from one stretch to the next. And it is designed to work safely alongside construction crews while other trades continue on site, without needing a separate cordoned-off work area.
A foundation model for construction
Behind OG-1 is what Origin calls its Construction Action Model, a foundation model built specifically for construction rather than adapted from general-purpose robotics. The company says it brings together three parts: a reasoning system that plans and orchestrates the subtasks of a construction workflow, an action policy that lets the robot navigate on its own, identify exactly where to work, choose how to use each tool and assess the quality of its own work, and a controller that turns those decisions into precise, feedback-driven movement.
The model is trained on high-fidelity simulation and on deployment data from live job sites — the messy, changing reality of rooms mid-build, rather than a laboratory floor. That deployment-first approach is the heart of Origin’s pitch: the company says it spent 18 months building in stealth before coming out, precisely so it could prove the robot on real job sites first. Its first robots reached construction sites in New York within 10 months of the company’s founding, and OG-1 is now being deployed across commercial spaces, multifamily apartments, data centres, hotels and warehouses.
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One platform, many trades
Wall finishing is only the starting point. Origin says OG-1 is a modular, software-defined platform, and the same hardware and Construction Action Model will extend to new interior trades — taping, drywall installation, drilling and conduit installation among them. The company says its platform is ready for manufacturing at scale, and it is targeting 150 deployed robots by the end of 2027.
The opportunity is enormous. Origin’s co-founder and CEO Yogesh Ghaturle points out that while construction has mechanised heavy exterior work over the last century, much of the skilled work inside the building — which the company says accounts for more than 65 per cent of construction timelines — is still done by hand. A Zacua Ventures report cited by the company found construction robotics drew $1.36 billion in venture funding in the first three quarters of 2025, up 125 per cent from $612 million in all of 2024, yet robots still account for less than 0.03 per cent of global construction spending. OG-1 is Origin’s answer to that gap: a robot that learns trade after trade, until the whole interior of a building can be finished by machines working alongside the people who build it.
Origin was founded in early 2025 by Yogesh Ghaturle, Ashish Daga and Tushar Makkar, and is headquartered in San Francisco. Ghaturle previously founded Perpule, which Amazon acquired in 2021; Makkar leads autonomy and brings a decade of experience building AI systems at scale, most recently leading AI teams at Eightfold AI; and Daga leads hardware, having previously built precision automation hardware at Morphle Labs.
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