Hugging Face's $399 Microduck Sold 10,000 Units in Five Days, Powered by Shenzhen's Seeed
Scobleizer · x · 2026-09-13
Geek Park interviews Eric Pan, founder of Seeed Studio, about manufacturing Hugging Face's Microduck robot. From Hugging Face-acquired Pollen Robotics, the $399 robot sold one unit every four seconds at peak — 10,000 presold in five days, over $5 million, with orders booked months out.
Highlights:
- The Microduck prototype was built on Seeed's open-source hardware; Pollen Robotics was a Seeed customer for years before the acquisition.
- Pan says nearly every Silicon Valley hardware wave has run through Seeed's supply chain.
- His advice to founders arriving in Shenzhen: don't rebuild hardware from scratch — the core skill is learning what you don't have to build.
More from Embodied
- Walden Robotics CTO: general-purpose robot manipulation is having its 'GPT moment' — adnothing · 2026-10-30
- Gym-Anything Team Stopped at 25 Simulations Due to Resource Limits, Seeks Collaborators — wellecks · 2026-10-30
- Gym-Anything Adds Audit Agents That Try to Break Simulations With Legal Robot Actions — wellecks · 2026-10-30
- NVIDIA researcher: train robot policies with privileged sim info, improving Pi 0.5 — wellecks · 2026-10-30
- CMU Auto-Builds 25 Robot Simulations with Agents; Frontier Model Solves 0 of 25 Test Tasks — wellecks · 2026-10-30
- Leveraging Simulator Privileged Information: Three Methods to Improve Robot Models — wellecks · 2026-10-30