Hugging Face’s new programmable Reachy Mini bots launched this week. The AI robots are open source, Raspberry Pi-powered, and come with cartoonish antennae and big googly eyes. They don’t do much out of the box. And that’s kind of the point.

Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, and Anthony Ha dig into the launch of Reachy Mini, which pulled in a surprising $500,000 in sales in its first 24 hours. As open source companies like Hugging Face explore physical products, Kirsten and Max agree that Reachy Mini might be the Seinfeld of AI hardware: the bots might do nothing in particular, but they’re still captivating. 

Listen to the full episode to hear more news from the week, including:

• Grok’s wild week and Linda Yaccarino’s abrupt exit from X
• How Rivian’s micromobility spinoff, Also, snagged another $200 million to build e-bikes, even though it hasn’t launched a product yet. 
• LangChain reportedly closing a new round that would push its valuation to $1 billion, thanks in part to a pivot toward monetizing its developer tools

Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned!

Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. 

Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.