Almond AI

Almond AI is an early-stage robotics startup founded in 2025 by Saba Khalilnaji and Shawn Patel, based in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The company was backed by Y Combinator in the Spring 2025 batch and operates a small team of approximately 3 people. Every robot the company produces is designed and assembled in-house at their San Francisco workshop.

Almond's product strategy centers on two robotic platforms. The first, AlmondBot, is a vision-based AI robot designed for high-mix pick-and-place automation in manufacturing environments, capable of machine tending, pick and place operations, and quality inspection. The second platform, Axol, is a dual-arm robot built for physical AI applications — a form factor intended to mimic human bimanual manipulation and enable more complex assembly and manipulation tasks in unstructured environments. Almond leverages computer vision powered by Roboflow for perception and model training.

The company delivers its robots under a robot-as-a-service (RaaS) model, offering fully integrated automation at pricing as low as $7 per hour — substantially undercutting the total cost of traditional robot integration projects. This model targets small and medium manufacturers that previously could not afford industrial robot deployments. Almond exhibited at the Automate show and has generated media coverage from Fabbaloo and Hiretop.

Saba Khalilnaji brings experience as a former logistics engineer at DoorDash and ex-CTO at Conduit. Shawn Patel is a former Co-Founder and CTO at Camphor with hardware experience at Google and an EECS degree from UC Berkeley. The combination positions Almond at the intersection of manufacturing software integration and hardware robotics.