Grace Brown, a 25-year-old mechatronics engineer, has taken her companion robot Abi from a handful of Melbourne pilot sites to 22 Mecwacare aged-care facilities across Australia, and her startup Andromeda Robotics is now opening a waitlist to bring the robot into American nursing homes. The expansion follows a $23 million Series A round in September 2025 led by San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures at a $100 million valuation, with Rethink Impact, Main Sequence, Artesian, Visible Ventures, Trampoline, Startmate and Purpose Ventures also participating — a striking vote of confidence for a company that started with just a $3 million seed round in 2024.
Meet Abi
Abi is designed to look approachable rather than clinical, with a colorful, rounded body that Brown says was deliberately inspired by Disney and Pixar characters to avoid the uncanny, unsettling look that has hurt adoption of more humanoid-looking care robots. The robot is AI-enabled, can converse in 90 languages, and is built to learn from repeated interactions with the same residents over time, gradually tailoring its responses to individual preferences and conversational habits. Andromeda’s newest version, nicknamed ‘Genesis Abi,’ began entering Mecwacare facilities in September 2025 with an upgraded ability to navigate a care home independently once staff input a daily activity schedule, letting it move between group activities and one-on-one check-ins without a staff member guiding it by hand.
Why Aged Care Facilities Are Buying In
The pitch to nursing homes is not that Abi replaces staff, but that it fills gaps chronically under-resourced facilities cannot otherwise cover — sitting with a resident during downtime, leading a group trivia or music session, or simply being present during hours when staffing ratios are thinnest. Andromeda says it is close to signing its first multi-home customer in California as it builds out the US market, and the company has also announced plans to build Australia’s first dedicated humanoid robot production line, alongside hiring animatronics specialists in the United States to refine Abi’s design for a broader market.
The Scale of the Problem It’s Meant to Solve
The push behind companion robots is grounded in a genuinely large public health problem: a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report finds that roughly one-fourth of adults aged 65 and older experience social isolation, a condition linked to measurably higher risk of dementia, heart disease and stroke. That statistic has driven a wave of academic and commercial interest in robotic companionship, of which Andromeda is only one, higher-profile entrant, alongside a broader eldercare robot market that industry estimates now value at roughly $3.14 billion, projected to grow at a 12.5% annual rate through the end of the decade.
What Researchers Are Finding About Trust
Academic researchers studying this category are raising a caution that commercial rollouts like Andromeda’s will eventually have to answer. Chorong Park, an associate professor who leads the Empathetic Lifespan AI & Robotics for Aging (ELARA) Lab at the University of Houston, published findings in May 2026 based on a co-design study that embedded older adults directly in the development process, including sessions where participants used air-dry clay to sculpt what they considered an ideal companion robot. Park’s research, conducted with undergraduate researchers Anika Vadlamudi, Jana Qaddoura and Noorul Maqbool and published through the Association for Computing Machinery, found that fear of intrusive surveillance can be a significant barrier preventing older adults from adopting robots like Abi in the first place — a concern directly relevant to any robot designed to observe, remember and adapt to a resident’s daily patterns.
Two Ways to Read the Same Data
Andromeda’s commercial success suggests aged-care operators believe the loneliness problem is urgent enough to justify deploying AI companions now, even before every open research question about privacy and trust is resolved — Brown’s rapid expansion from Melbourne pilots to 22 facilities in roughly two years reflects real demand from care home operators managing thin staff ratios. Park’s academic research suggests the opposite caution is equally valid: robots that quietly track a resident’s routines, conversations and moods for the sake of personalization can trigger exactly the kind of surveillance anxiety that keeps some of the most isolated older adults from using the technology meant to help them, meaning commercial rollout speed and research-backed trust-building may be working on different timelines.
What to Watch Next
The test for Abi’s US expansion will be whether Andromeda can translate its Australian traction — 22 facilities and a near-signed California customer — into contracts with US operators who face similar staffing pressures but a more fragmented, heavily regulated aged-care market. Meanwhile, ELARA Lab’s global research network is pushing to make privacy safeguards and augmented-reality tools for intergenerational connection part of the design conversation before, rather than after, robots like Abi become a fixture in more nursing homes — a sequencing question that will likely determine how quickly companion robots move from novelty pilot to standard practice in elder care.
