SYNCERE raises $11M for LUME, a floor lamp that folds laundry

a16z Speedrun led the pre-seed round for the Palo Alto startup, whose LUME lamp-robot is already in customers' homes.

SYNCERE has raised $11 million in pre-seed funding led by a16z Speedrun, the Palo Alto robotics company announced on November 3. Draper Associates, Physical World, Sequel and SeaX Ventures also participated. The company was founded less than a year ago by roboticists Dr. Aaron Tan and Dr. Angus Fung.

Its first product, LUME, is a floor lamp that doubles as a household robot. Starting at $2,699, it lights the room, moves through the home and handles chores including folding laundry, tidying and making the bed, gaining new capabilities through software updates. Named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2026, LUME has generated millions of dollars in pre-order demand, and the company says it has already gone from concept to production and into customers' homes.

SYNCERE will use the funding to accelerate LUME deliveries, scale manufacturing capacity and expand its physical AI capabilities into new commercial applications. The team brings research backgrounds at Stanford, Harvard, the University of Toronto and UC Berkeley, and engineering and design experience at Nuro, AMD, GM and Apple.

The pitch is distribution first. "Home robotics has a deployment problem disguised as a data problem," said Tan, SYNCERE's co-founder and CEO. "Robots need real-world data to become reliable, but they can't get into people's homes until they're reliable. We built LUME to break that cycle." A lamp people already want in the living room gets the robot through the front door; every unit shipped then becomes a data source for the next software update. The open question is whether a $2,699 lamp can sell widely enough to build that data flywheel before bigger home-robot rivals arrive.