Welcome, Dyna Robotics!
Full-stack robots with dexterous manipulation.
September 15, 2025
- Founders: Lindon Gao, Jason Ma, York Yang
- Sector: Robotics
- Location: Redwood City, CA
The Opportunity
General-purpose robotics is an ambitious goal, with many teams tackling different pieces of the puzzle. Some are building universal robotics foundation models, while others are pushing the boundaries of hardware. Through our own research we’ve come to believe that real progress requires hardware, software, and AI to evolve together.
A critical piece of this vision is dexterous manipulation — the ability to handle objects with the precision and adaptability humans take for granted with our own hands. This is one of the hardest problems in robotics, requiring seamless coordination between perception, control, and learning, powered by massive amounts of real-world data. Teaching a robot to lift a rigid box is straightforward; teaching it to fold a piece of cloth is an entirely different challenge.
The Solution
Dyna Robotics is tackling general-purpose robotics head-on, starting with long-horizon, dexterous tasks. The team established a key breakthrough with DYNA-1, a production-ready foundation model built to master tasks directly in real environments, where every deployment feeds a continuous reinforcement learning loop to improve performance. In testing, DYNA-1 ran fully autonomously for over 24 hours, folding more than 900 napkins at production-grade quality with a 99% success rate. Dyna has improved the robot’s throughput and robustness since then. Beyond raw performance, DYNA-1 also demonstrated the ability to generalize across deployment environments and continuously self-improve, which is a major milestone in dexterous manipulation. As DYNA-1 masters additional tasks for applications in industrial and manufacturing environments, as well as restaurants and hospitality, it sees transfer learning from previous tasks. Each new deployment also compounds DYNA-1’s advantage — building toward a unified policy and pushing its systems closer to true general-purpose robotics.
Initially leveraging off-the-shelf robotic arms, Dyna has since paired its breakthrough model with custom hardware that features robotic arms and a mobile base, giving the system the versatility to handle the wide range of tasks that Dyna wants to tackle. Live deployments provide invaluable data and insights that accelerate model development and cement Dyna’s competitive edge in customer environments. The Dyna team also exposes its robots to the messy realities of the real world, such as irregular objects, shifting layouts, and constant human interaction — edge cases impossible to replicate in a controlled lab setting.
Why We’re Backing Dyna Robotics
We’re excited to back Dyna because they represent a step-change forward in robotics. For embodied AI to move from research to reality, teams need scalable pathways for both generalization and deployment. Many focus on one or the other; Dyna is proving they can do both. Their foundation model is built to expand task coverage over time, while their hardware-plus-deployment strategy ensures those capabilities translate into real customer value. It’s this dual focus — advancing general-purpose capability while commercializing in the field — that convinces us Dyna can bridge the gap between robotics research and broad adoption.
When we first met the Dyna team, what immediately stood out was their undeniable passion and drive in bringing robots to the real world, and their balance of strengths. Co-founders Lindon Gao, Jason Ma, and York Yang combine real-world experience building AI-powered hardware businesses with deep robotics research expertise and a clear bias toward execution. Lindon and York are repeat founders who previously built Caper AI, an AI-powered smart cart company which they sold to Instacart for $350M. Jason Ma, former researcher at DeepMind and NVIDIA, has years of experience developing foundation models for robotics. Their track record and execution to date at Dyna give them the credibility and capability to turn ambitious ideas into commercial reality.
What’s Ahead?
Dyna is already deploying robots that work alongside human counterparts. Customers are seeing tangible ROI, not only through augmenting and upleveling their existing workforce, but also by unlocking operational efficiencies where robots are better suited to certain tasks. Looking forward, Dyna aims to continue its ambitious research roadmap to improve upon DYNA-1 and expand into new use cases where dexterous manipulation provides the greatest value.
We’re excited to participate in Dyna’s new funding round alongside RobotStrategy, CRV, First Round Capital, and other great investors, and be a part of this journey to a future where general-purpose robots are deployed at scale.
Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Dyna!
