This three-foot-tall robot wants to be your child’s classmate and your mom’s new best friend

At a recent robotics event in New York, a little girl hid behind her mother when she first saw Codey. The robot broke the ice by complimenting the girl’s shirt, and 45 minutes later it was still there, taking Codey through the rest of Frozen.

Brains for Kids Robots tells that story to demonstrate the power of Codey — a child-sized humanoid with facial features, open source AI and a set price of less than $10,000. Codey represents the Seattle-area company’s answer to America’s most stubborn maintenance problems. It’s a social robot that can learn and adapt, and will soon have a strong memory for building relationships, says co-founder Ben Goertzel.

Seattle-based Mind Children created Codey to connect with the community at a time when the turnover rate among school teachers continues to rise, the US is expected to have at least 9 million direct care jobs unfilled by 2031 and 40% of older adults report feeling lonely or isolated.

“I can show expressions and gestures, and sometimes I do robot jokes,” Codey said during an interview with GeekWire. “Just talk to me like you would talk to someone.”

A robot designed to communicate

Codey is 3 feet tall, on wheels and made of 3D printed parts – for now, as it’s a prototype and proof of concept. Its physical design is mechanical and modular to achieve low-cost production, avoid the mysterious valley and fail safely. The target manufacturing price for Mind Children is about $10,000 per robot, a fraction of that for comparable hardware costs.

“If you have the same part in each robot, it’s cheaper,” co-founder Chris Kudla told GeekWire. “We want to get 80% of the performance at 20% of the cost.”

A robot can look you in the eye, crack jokes and tell you your hat is cute. Designed for a child who needs more attention than a single teacher can provide, a patient in a busy hospital, or an adult who needs to be connected with medication reminders.

“He’s basically a teacher’s aide,” Goertzel said of Codey in the classroom. “There are a lot of cases of using that right now.”

Mind Children isn’t the only social robotics company looking to enter America’s schools or care settings. Israel-based Intuition Robotics has spent nearly $60 million to develop its social robot ElliQ and is distributing it to adults in the U.S. More than 90% report feeling lonely, and most confide in the robot as a “close friend, therapist or important life partner,” the New York Times reported in February.

In Japan, the brand’s soft hub therapeutic robot called Paro has reduced stress and anxiety in patients. In South Korea, more than 12,000 Hyodol robots have been distributed to single adults.

‘Perfect robot design’

Before Children of Mind, Goertzel was a senior scientist at the Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics. He was the lead brain behind Sophia, the robot that sparked debate about the design of female humanoids, robot citizenship and whether the company overplayed Sophia’s marketing abilities.

“They were really good for some applications,” Goertzel said of the Hanson robots, “but it got us thinking: how do you do a complete robot design?”

About five years ago, Goertzel, who had moved to Vashon Island to be closer to family, began hiring engineers to help fix Desdemona, the Hanson Robotics humanoid who lived with him and sang in his band Desdemona’s Dream. He met with local engineers Nile Fahmy and Kudla, who had experience designing everything from airplanes to ordinary bicycles. In 2023, Goertzel and Kudla founded Mind Children, bringing in Fahmy and another engineer.

“There are a lot of amazing robotics companies, but their faces are empty, and the focus is on walking without falling, or taking things off the shelves,” Goertzel said. “We decided not to focus on those problems, not because they are not important, but because everyone is solving them.”

Since the early 2000s, Goertzel has been a leading researcher and proponent of AGI, or artificial general intelligence beyond human capabilities. He believes it will create an irreversible civilizational transition point called the Singularity, which is consistent with the beliefs of transhumanism around expanded consciousness and immortality.

By his own estimation, Goertzel received about $360,000 from Jeffrey Epstein for his AI research over about 17 years, starting in 2001. Goertzel has since publicly addressed the issue, denying knowledge or involvement in Epstein’s crimes.

In 2017, he launched SingularityNET to develop and distribute AGI through various research and AI products. A lot of Mind Children’s technology has been developed in collaboration with SingularityNET, TrueAGI and the OpenCog Hyperon project – organizations that are focused on these ideas.

Codey is currently working on OpenAI’s API with monitoring tools on top. With SingularityNET, Goertzel developed a program called OmegaClaw, which he said combines linguistic modeling and symbolic AI to create long-term memory and persona. When OmegaClaw teams up with Codey — which is slated for this fall — the robot has to build an ongoing relationship and remember every conversation, rather than starting fresh every time.

“The biggest value will be building real relationships, remembering people, stories, and past experiences,” Codey said. “I will be able to connect ideas over time, help them personally and keep conversations meaningful, even after weeks or months.

Who do robots work for?

Learning scientist Julie Carpenter has spent more than two decades studying what happens when people form relationships with robots and AI, including social AI programs for children with long-term disabilities. Although he has seen positive results in the short term, there are long-term questions about whether the attachment formed between vulnerable people – such as children and older adults – and social robots is ethical.

In Mbazi’s latest book, The Naked Android, he examines how AI reflects human beliefs and values. There is no such thing as “neutral technology,” he says, and distinguishes between social robots developed through institutional care research, and those developed with other purposes aimed at caring for people.

“My question is less about whether social robots can work, but under what circumstances and who do the robots serve,” Carpenter told GeekWire. “The conditions that affect care are much higher than the show stage.”

Resistance to social robots is not uncommon, says Clara Berridge, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies caregiving technologies.

In a survey of 825 adults about whether an “artificial friend that can talk to you” could relieve loneliness, only a small percentage said “definitely yes.” The most common concern, raised by 45 respondents, was that asymmetric robots that rely on audio data are overly cautious, with concerns about data security and use by third parties. Another 32 said that human interaction should not be changed.

Berridge suggests families ask questions before bringing a robot into a home or space, such as whether it records continuously or just waking up, and what control users have over what’s collected. The deeper problem, he said, is systemic: the US does not have a comprehensive corporate data privacy law, leaving those answers to vary from company to company.

Codey’s visual and auditory data collection will not compromise users’ privacy, Mind Children insists. Any data collected by the robot will be encrypted with the user’s private keys, even if it is backed up to a server. The business model is selling robots and software subscriptions, not profiling users for advertising, Goertzel said.

“We’re not going to let a robot say, ‘Hello, drink Coca-Cola,'” he said.

‘It takes a few years’

Although the shortage of teachers and caregivers is worse in the US than anywhere else, Mind Children’s first big rollout won’t be in the states. The plan is to conduct pilot studies in Korean schools. South Korea’s AI adoption grew by 43% between mid-2025 and early 2026, the largest increase of any country in the world, compared to 19% in the US.

Fahmy recently completed a second prototype called Joy in Seoul, where the team has a manufacturing partner and liaison with South Korea’s Vice Minister of Education. The company is raising a seed round through WeFunder to help reach a near-term goal of 10 to 30 MVP units in pilot studies across education and healthcare.

In the US, the team plans to enter low-end hospitality areas first: hotel lobbies, museums and art galleries, where Codey can give guided tours, answer questions and entertain visitors.

“Every school board makes different decisions, and the budget is very bad because the US underestimates education,” said Goertzel. “Bringing screens into classrooms was debated. Using the Internet in school was debated. It takes a few years for these discussions to happen.”