Hebbian Robotics
"Foundational infrastructure for Physical AI."
San Francisco YC S26 start-up founded 2026 that builds HFlow, an open-source SDK for checking and curating robot training data.
Hebbian Robotics is a San Francisco start-up building open-source data infrastructure for robot learning, the tooling that robotics teams use to check, curate and query the recordings they train manipulation models on. It is incorporated as a public benefit corporation, Hebbian Robotics PBC, and was founded in 2026. It joined Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, where its profile lists a team of two.
The co-founders are Brandon Ong and Kingston Kuan. Ong previously built Gigit AI, a Sequoia-backed customer-experience start-up, worked on AI for low-resource languages that topped the SEA-HELM benchmark, and briefly pursued a robotics PhD at Columbia and NTU. Kuan spent several years at Jane Street building high-throughput systems, worked at Verkada on its video surveillance platform, and graduated as valedictorian in computer engineering from the National University of Singapore.
Its main product is HFlow, an Apache-2.0 Python SDK and pipeline introduced in August 2026. HFlow takes physical-AI episodes such as human egocentric recordings, robot teleoperation sessions and policy rollouts and turns them into quality-checked, queryable datasets. Episodes are stored as canonical MCAP files with in-band H.264 video and separate chunks for camera and state streams. Users write their own quality checks and enrichments as decorated Python functions, whose results are stored as measurements in a Parquet catalog and curated with SQL through DuckDB. The pipeline runs locally on an Airflow 3 runtime under Docker Compose or deploys to an existing Airflow service such as Astronomer, MWAA or Cloud Composer, and can be tested in-process without infrastructure. The repository describes itself as pre-v1 and single-tenant; training and LeRobot conversion are outside its scope. It is the company's most-starred GitHub project, with about 286 stars.
Other open-source releases include Pareto, a Rust data-curation tool for robotics training sets; openpi-flash, a real-time inference engine for Physical Intelligence's openpi models; mujoco-workbench, a command-line tool and agent skills for prototyping MuJoCo simulation scenes; lerobot-dataset-io for inspecting and subsetting LeRobot datasets; and abc-box, a tabletop workcell viewer with bill of materials and build guide. The team also publishes engineering notes, including a write-up of fine-tuning the Pi05 model on about 400 episodes for a two-arm sink-cleaning task using two AgileX Piper arms and Orbbec and RealSense cameras, at roughly 10,000 US dollars of hardware.
The company's stated customers are robotics data teams and data providers; none are named publicly, and no funding amount beyond Y Combinator backing has been disclosed.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
HFlow
- Model: HFlow
- Launch Year: 2026
Open-source pipeline SDK that turns robot and human episodes into quality-checked, queryable training datasets.
Pareto
- Model: Pareto
- Launch Year: 2026
Data curation tool for understanding and improving robotics model training datasets.
openpi-flash
Real-time inference engine for Physical Intelligence's openpi robot policy models.
mujoco-workbench
Command-line tool and agent skills for prototyping custom MuJoCo simulation scenes.
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Contact Hebbian Robotics
WEBSITE
https://hebbianrobotics.comHEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2026
Primary Role
Software/Algorithm
Company Size
employees 1-10
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
-
