Fable Engineering #1 – Making Robots Lovable

We’re Kush and Pierre-Louis, co-founders of Fable Engineering, and we’re thrilled to welcome you to our new Substack. This is your insider look into how we’re building lovable robots.

Jul 04, 2025

📬 Welcome to the Fable Engineering Substack

Hi there — and welcome!

This is the very first issue of Fable Engineering’s bi-weekly investor update. Every two weeks, we’ll share a quick behind-the-scenes look at our progress as we build lovable robots for the smart home — products that feel more like a friend than a gadget.

We’re Kush and Pierre-Louis, co-founders of Fable. We’re engineers, product designers, and AI tinkerers obsessed with making the smart home actually feel smart — not just a bunch of cold, fragmented devices that barely talk to each other. We're on a mission to bring warmth, intelligence, and emotion back into the household.

🚀 Highlights from the Past Month

It’s been a big one! Here's what we've been up to:

Joined The House Fund AI Accelerator
After an exciting start at Founders Inc., we made the move to The House Fund's AI accelerator. It’s a better fit for our long-term ambition: building a presence-aware, emotionally intelligent companion for the home.
Raised $250K in Pre-Seed Funding
We're thrilled to have closed our first $250,000 in funding. This gives us the runway to double down on development and start testing the product with real families.
Completed V1 of Our Robot
We wrapped up our first hardware prototype based on the Open Duck Mini open-source robotics platform. It gave us critical insights into form factor, navigation, and the challenges of bringing a lovable robot to life.
Now Building V2 for Our Pilot Program
All eyes are now on V2: a fully custom, wheel-based version of our robot, designed to begin real-world testing with families this August. This version will incorporate everything we’ve learned so far — plus new intelligence and emotion-sensing capabilities.

🧭 What’s Ahead

We’re entering a heads-down, high-output phase. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be:

Finalizing the mechanical design and manufacturability of V2
Running early indoor navigation tests
Preparing onboarding and UX flow for pilot testers
Speaking to families, caregivers, and solo adults to refine core use cases

Our goal is simple: by August, we want Zero — our companion robot — in homes, learning, adapting, and forming real emotional bonds.

🧰 Behind the Scenes

We’ve been living in the lab lately — iterating on parts, testing sensors, and laughing at our robot's unexpected "personalities" as it comes to life.