Fable Engineering #6: Inside the Fable x Futurewave Partnership
Why we partnered with Europe's premier product innovation agency
What It Unlocks for Our Company
Hey friends,
Today we’re excited to share something that changes the trajectory of Fable: Futurewave is joining us as a shareholder and strategic partner in our mission to bring truly lovable, AI-powered robots into every home.
Futurewave is a premier European product innovation agency based in Belgium with 20+ world-class engineers and designers. They specialize in taking products from concept through full industrialization and market launch, working across hardware, electronics, industrial design, and embedded systems. They’ve partnered with iconic brands like Decathlon, Adidas, Renault, Cowboy, and Nokia, helping them ship products that millions of people use every day.
This isn’t a typical partnership announcement. This is about bringing together two teams who share a vision for what AI-powered hardware should feel like and betting on that vision together.
How It All Started: A Conversation About What’s Missing
I first met Cédric de Bellefroid, co-founder and CEO of Futurewave, last summer. We were introduced through a mutual contact in the robotics space, and within the first ten minutes of our call, it was clear we were speaking the same language.
We both believed that the wave of AI-powered hardware coming to market was missing something fundamental: the soul that makes you actually want to live with these devices. Too much focus on capabilities, demos, and specs. Not enough on warmth, legibility, and the quiet presence that earns a place in your home.
Cédric and his co-founders, Joachim Froment (Creative Director) and Guillaume de Foestraets (CTO), had spent years building Futurewave into one of Europe’s premier product innovation agencies. They’d worked with iconic brands and developed products that millions of people use every day.
What drew me to them wasn’t just their portfolio. It was their process: short-cycle iterations, a maker mindset, and an obsessive focus on making technology approachable and human-centered.
When we met in person in San Francisco this October, it became evident that this wasn’t just an alignment of visions, it was a natural fit. We walked through our design philosophy, our product roadmap, and the specific challenges we were tackling with FE-0. Cédric and Joachim understood immediately. They’d been waiting to work on something like this.
What Futurewave Brings: 20+ Engineers and Designers Who Ship
Futurewave isn’t a consultancy that hands you a deck and walks away. They’re a 20-person multidisciplinary team of electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial designers, strategists, and UX designers who work together to take products from concept through industrialization.
Here’s what that means for Fable, concretely:
1. Industrial Design Firepower
Joachim Froment is an award-winning designer (IF Award, Rado Star Prize, CES Innovation Award) whose work sits at the intersection of poetry and industrial thinking. His design philosophy, “Design is about telling a story without words. It is beautifully intuitive,” resonates deeply with how we think about FE-0.
With Futurewave, we’re not just iterating on form factor. We’re co-designing the entire physical language of the robot: how it moves, how it responds, how it occupies space in your home without demanding attention. We’re designing furniture, not gadgets.
2. Electronics and Embedded Systems Expertise
Building a mobile, vision-language-driven robot means integrating cameras, microphones, motors, batteries, and compute, all in a small, thermally-constrained package that needs to feel warm, not loud or mechanical.
Futurewave’s hardware team has deep experience in PCB design, embedded software, sensor integration, and power management from their work on IoT devices, e-bikes, and connected products. They’ve helped us rethink our sensor placement, acoustic design, and thermal architecture so that the AI brain we’re building can live inside a body that feels calm and approachable.
3. A Proven Path from Prototype to Production
One of the hardest challenges in hardware is the valley between “working prototype” and “reliable product you can manufacture at scale.” Futurewave has crossed that valley dozens of times, working with ODMs and CMs across Europe and Asia to bring products to market.
They know how to design for manufacturability (DFM), how to run design validation tests (DVT), and how to navigate certifications (FCC, CE, safety standards) across multiple markets. This is the unglamorous, essential work that separates hardware startups that ship from those that don’t.
I’ve personally lived this challenge when I was a Product Manager at Withings, working on the body scales division. Bringing hardware with wireless connectivity, batteries, and sensors to market across the US, Europe, and Asia means getting through FCC certifications in the US, CE marking in Europe, and NMEA compliance and weight regulations in various markets. Every deviation in your circuit design, antenna placement, or material composition can trigger a full recertification cycle, a setback that costs months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With that experience on my side and Futurewave’s deep manufacturing relationships across the continent, we’re designing with certification and manufacturability as foundational constraints, not afterthoughts. We iterate on designs that we know can scale, not designs we hope will scale.
4. Speed and Agility That Matches Our Pace
We’ve always believed in moving fast, prototyping at software speed, iterating based on real user feedback, and staying lean. Futurewave’s process is built the same way: short-cycle iterations, continuous feedback, and a bias toward building rather than planning.
With them, we can go from sketch to working prototype in days, not weeks. We can test bold ideas quickly and kill bad ones early. This velocity is our competitive advantage.
What This Partnership Unlocks for FE-0
So what does this mean for our product? Here are three concrete things that change because of this partnership:
Design to AI to UX Loops, Faster
Industrial design constraints push requirements on the AI stack. For example: if we shrink the head geometry to make FE-0 feel less intimidating, we need to rethink microphone array placement for far-field voice recognition. If we adjust locomotion style to feel more intentional and less “robotic,” the motion planner needs tighter control loops.
With Futurewave embedded in our process, we can iterate on these design-AI-UX loops continuously rather than in slow, sequential phases. This is how we get to a robot that feels cohesive, where every design decision is informed by what the AI can do, and every AI capability is shaped by how it needs to feel.
Multi-Market Product Strategy from Day One
Futurewave has launched products across Europe, North America, and Asia. They understand localization, not just for regulatory compliance, but for cultural fit, packaging, retail presence, and after-sales support.
This means we’re not building a robot for the Bay Area and figuring out the rest later. We’re designing a product and go-to-market strategy that works globally, with regional adaptations baked in from the start.
A Team That Can Scale With Us
As we move from pilot program to production, we need more than consultants. We need partners who are invested in our success and who can grow with us. Futurewave becoming a shareholder means exactly that, they’re betting on this vision alongside us, for the long term.
They’re not building for us. They’re building with us.
What Comes Next
Over the next few posts, we’ll be diving deeper into the philosophy and process behind how we’re building FE-0, starting with the principles that guide our industrial design, the lessons we’ve learned from shipping consumer electronics at scale, and how we’re thinking about the entire experience from unboxing to everyday ritual.
For now, we want to say this: we couldn’t be more excited to write the future of home robotics with Futurewave. This is just the beginning.
Stay tuned.
Pierre-Louis
CEO, Fable Engineering
P.S. If you’re working on hardware, robotics, or AI-powered products and want to chat about design, manufacturing, or just swap war stories, reach out. We love talking to other builders.