Jannik Grothusen
| Jannik Grothusen | |
| Occupation | Founder and CEO, The Robot Learning Company |
|---|---|
| Known for | The Robot Learning Company |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley |
Jannik Grothusen is a German entrepreneur and roboticist who is the founder of The Robot Learning Company (TRLC), a startup developing infrastructure for building and deploying robot intelligence. The company is a member of the Y Combinator Spring 2025 batch and is based in San Francisco.[1]
Career
Grothusen studied at the University of California, Berkeley.[2] Prior to founding The Robot Learning Company, he gained attention in November 2024 for a project conducted alongside collaborator Kaspar Janssen in which the pair built an open-source robotic arm for approximately $120 and trained it to clean up spills using OpenAI's GPT-4o large language model. The system was programmed in four days using roughly 100 demonstrations to refine the robot's movements. The project, which connected to research at UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich, was covered by TechCrunch, Futurism, heise online, and other technology publications.[3][4][5]
Grothusen subsequently founded The Robot Learning Company, which describes its mission as providing "the infrastructure that robot intelligence is built and deployed on." The company's primary product line is the TRLC-DK1, an open-source development kit for AI-native robotics. The TRLC-DK1 is marketed as an all-in-one kit for single-arm robot learning, featuring a 700 mm reach, 1 kg payload capacity, leader and follower arms, and two cameras, priced at $3,999. An advanced variant, the TRLC-DK1-X, supports bimanual robot learning with two leader-follower arm kits and three cameras at a price of $6,999. Both kits use USB-C for data transfer and are compatible with Linux, macOS, and Windows. The hardware is manufactured in Germany and released as open source.[6]
The company operates in the machine learning and robotics sectors and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
References
- ↑ "The Robot Learning Company – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Jannik Grothusen – Crunchbase". 'Crunchbase}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Built in four days, this $120 robot arm cleans a spill with help from GPT-4o". 'TechCrunch}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "ChatGPT Can Now Control a Robot Arm". 'Futurism}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "GPT-4o: Open-source robotic arm removes spilled liquid on command". 'heise online}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "The Robot Learning Company". 'The Robot Learning Company}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.