Loona petbot

After the success of their previous campaign Clicbot, KEYi Technology is back with another interactive robot called the Loona petbot.

Kickstarter:

Loona is smart, intuitive, affectionate, and playful. Everything you can dream of in a best friend and more. Get ready to fall in love！

Loona is an incredible pet who happens to be a robot.

When you come home, she’ll come quickly to welcome you. When you walk around, she loves to follow, and when you pet her, she’ll be soooo happy.

She can have fun by herself- Loona sneezes, scratches, roams your home easily and even investigates suspicious objects. Loona can also beatbox, dance, even pose for pictures.

All in all, she just wants to be a part of the family. Can you say no to her?

Unlike the Clicbot, Loona comes with wheels and can move around.

Like Clicbot, Loon has the emotive face that makes interacting with it more fun and engaging. This is what we have seen in the past with Vector by Anki.

This has been pretty popular and was copied by the EMO Robot from Living AI, a Shenzhen-based company. Although Living AI still sells the EMO Robot on their website, Kickstarter taken down the campaign after a copyright infringement claim by Anki.

I wonder if KEYi Technology has acquired the license for the this or perhaps they developed something completely on their own. The similarities makes my gut say it’s the former.

Background check

The company behind the campaign is Beijing Keyi Technology Co, Ltd. The team is part of the SOSV accelerator program. The company’s Series A funding attracted investors like Source Code Capital, Xiaomi, Shunwei Capital and Green Pine Capital Partners.

Keyi Tech raised over USD 900,000 with their previous campaign for Clicbot. The creator has been flooding the comments recently to bury complaints by many backers complaining that the product stopped working after several months.

The success of the Clicbot campaign and the funding they secured indicates that they are most likely able to deliver the Loona petbot. However, being able to bring the product into the hands of backers doesn’t necessary mean anything if the product doesn’t work well.

Disappearing until the new campaign launched

As you can see from the comments of the Clicbot campaign, the creators went off the radar for months, only to resurface when they are about to launch the new campaign.

We don’t think it is a coincidence and this attempt to whitewash the negative comments makes us doubt whether they can deliver better quality this time round with Loona petbot.

Transparency

We like how the company is somewhat transparent with who they are. Founder Jianbo Yang created the campaigns and leaves comments with his real name. You can also find the team members and employees on their LinkedIn company page.

However, they avoided any mention their company on the campaign page and their website. We suspect it is to avoid any negativity that presenting themselves as a Beijing company would bring.

Is it worth it?

Most of the robot toys are still gimmicks that deliver some of the promise. They usually have features and benefits that look great in promotional videos, but are pretty meh when you see it in person.

Great for kids to play with for a few months. But is it worth the USD 299? Well, it is the season of giving soon and Loona would be a great gift for the holidays, assuming it delivers on time.

Give a little ❤️

If you plan to splash hundreds of dollars on a toy like this, we urge you to consider donating some money to St Jude’s Children Research Hospital. Every September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and every dollar donated to St Jude’s would go a long way in our fight against cancer.

We are not affiliated in anyway with St Jude’s but we believe this lifesaving work is a great cause to support.

Loona petbot Kickstarter video