Hugging Face Made $2.6M in 24 Hours Selling Microduck Robot for $399
Forget sterile silicon valley humanoids designed to steal white-collar jobs. The true vanguard of physical artificial intelligence has arrived in bright yellow plastic, packed with open-source code and ready to waddle directly into living rooms.
The robotics market just pivoted toward the avian world as Hugging Face opened pre-orders for Microduck, a 25-centimeter-tall programmable duck robot priced at $399. Within the first six hours of launch, the campaign hauled in $1 million, before surging past $2.6 million in just 24 hours, according to co-founder Thomas Wolf.
Underneath the whimsical toy exterior lies genuine research hardware: 15 servo motors, an onboard camera, LiDAR sensors, and dual IMU modules. The mechanical bird can waddle around, recover seamlessly after tripping over floor rugs, squat, pick up objects weighing up to 800 grams with its beak, and roll around on custom miniature roller skates.
All training pipelines, including a full reinforcement learning stack and physics simulation SDK, have been published directly to GitHub. Developers can fine-tune locomotion policies in digital sandboxes before flashing the weights straight onto their physical duck.
This release marks a major consumer push following Hugging Face's acquisition of French hardware startup Pollen Robotics in April 2025, which previously spawned the desktop assistant Reachy Mini. Meanwhile, chip behemoth Nvidia moved to finalize a massive $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face after years of supplying its core computing infrastructure.
Addressing concerns about smart devices monitoring living rooms, CEO Clément Delangue argued that open-source bots provide far greater privacy than black-box corporate hardware controlled by unpredictable tech billionaires. However, security analysts note that custom community software flashed onto the robot's cameras and microphones can still easily stream local sensor telemetry to external servers.
While mega-corporations pour billions into terrifying six-foot bipedal humanoids, millions of dollars are flowing straight into open-source plastic waterfowl with roller skates. Physical AI might not conquer the world with cold corporate efficiency, but rather with an uncontrollable swarm of quacking desktop bots.
Source: TechCrunch
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