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Dream Labs, a startup founded by four former NVIDIA GR00T researchers, has come out of stealth with Dream-1, a model that controls two-armed robots it was never trained on. Its public API is open now, from $3 per hour.
CEO Joel Jang led the world-model work for NVIDIA's GR00T robotics project. Chief scientist Scott Reed spent eight years at DeepMind, where he led Gato and advised early Genie research. The company raised a $90 million seed round led by B Capital, with Kindred Ventures, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC and others taking part. Dream Labs announced Dream-1 on October 19, 2026.
What it is
- A world action model. It learns how the world moves from video, and predicts both the next video frames and the robot's actions.
- Zero-shot on new robots. It controls two-armed robots with parallel grippers that it never trained on.
- Input: images from three cameras, one on the head and one on each wrist.
- Output: where each gripper should be in space and whether it is open or closed. The robot's own control software turns these positions into joint movements.
- 1.6 seconds of actions per call.
- No fine-tuning step. The team's previous model, DreamZero (February 2026), needed post-training on 30 minutes of a robot's data. Dream-1 skips that.
- Tested by partners on their own robots, including the original PR2, a research robot released 18 years ago.
Dream Labs calls Dream-1 a research beta. It is not validated for safety-critical use.
Tests
Robocurve, an independent company that tests AI models on real robots, ran each setup 120 times on its RoboDojo-RC Tier 1 benchmark. Scores include partial credit.
| Model | Mean score | Cost per attempt | Minutes per attempt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dream-1 | 59.3% | $0.15 | 1.5 |
| Gemini 4 Argon (high) | 48.2% | $2.34 | 20.5 |
| GPT-6 Astra (high) | 42.5% | $3.48 | 4.0 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 (high) | 38.2% | $2.23 | 3.1 |
Dream Labs says a Dream-1 attempt is 16 times cheaper than one with Gemini 4 Argon.
Price
| Model | Price |
|---|---|
| Dream-1 | $3 per hour |
| Dream-1-flash | $2 per hour |
The API is open now at platform.dreamlabs.ai. Robot hardware is not included.
Sources
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