SAN FRANCISCO – Oct. 15, 2026 – Origin, a full-stack physical AI company building general-purpose robots for interior construction, today emerged from stealth with $20 million in total funding, co-led by Accel and Zacua Ventures. Other backers include Unilazer Ventures, Schema Ventures, Z21, ISAI and Imad Ventures, alongside angel investors from Anduril, Skild AI, 1X and Tesla. The funding will primarily go toward deploying OG-1, Origin's flagship robot, and building out its fleet. It will also support large-scale pilots with customers in the U.S. and Europe—including two of the largest drywall finishing contractors in the U.S., with additional pilots scheduled in Germany, Sweden, France and Saudi Arabia—and extend the platform to new interior trades.
From housing and factories to warehouses and AI data centers, demand for new construction is rising faster than the industry can staff it. Around the world, contractors are being asked to deliver more, faster, with too few skilled workers. A 2026 survey found that worker shortages delayed projects for 42% of responding U.S. construction firms. Rising costs, inconsistent quality and stagnant productivity add to the pressure, stretching schedules and limiting the projects contractors can take on. Origin is building robots to help crews increase capacity, deliver consistently and turn that demand into revenue.
“Too many construction robots perform well in a lab and fail within a week on a live job site. Origin built for the job site from the start, and it shows in the results: the robot works, crews trust it and the company can manufacture it at volume,” said Vivin Hegde, founding partner at Zacua Ventures. “With the industry losing skilled tradespeople faster than it can train them, that reliability is what turns a promising technology into a company worth backing.”
OG-1 is Origin’s flagship robot, designed to perform multiple interior construction trades on a single platform. Today, it autonomously completes wall-finishing workflows without human intervention. It applies compound, sands and primes walls to a professional finish. OG-1 can work long shifts and handle complex tasks, from targeted spraying and finishing high walls to handling difficult areas like corners, pillars, soffits and edges, and it’s already delivering the quality expected of a skilled professional.
OG-1’s modular hardware platform and interchangeable tools allow the same robot to take on more interior trades over time without needing any platform changes. Built for rough, chaotic construction sites and uneven surfaces, OG-1 moves on a three-wheeled platform and has a 360-degree view of its surroundings. It can work at heights of up to 14 feet and handle contact-rich tasks, such as sanding, using real-time force control to keep consistent pressure against the wall. OG-1 is designed to work safely alongside construction crews while other trades continue on sites, without requiring a separate cordoned-off work area.
“We believe a foundational physical AI model built specifically for construction is the right approach to win in this massive market, where robotics has barely scratched the surface,” said Anagh Prasad, Investor at Accel. “The Origin team has moved at an incredible pace since we first partnered with them, and their early customer traction shows the technology is ready and the market is waiting. We are excited to back Yogesh, Tushar and Ashish as they bring AI to the built world, making construction faster, safer and more economical.”
OG-1 is powered by Origin’s Construction Action Model, a foundation model built specifically for construction. It brings together three core components:
- A reasoning system that plans and orchestrates complex sub-tasks in the construction workflows
- An action policy that enables OG-1 to navigate autonomously, identify exactly where to work, determine how to use each tool and assess the quality of its work
- A controller that translates the policy’s actions through precise, feedback-driven control of the robot
Together, these components enable OG-1 to apply compound, sand, prime walls or do other construction tasks, adapting to changing site conditions. The model is trained using high-fidelity simulation and deployment data from live job sites. It enables OG-1 to generalize across different construction tasks and environments, transferring learned capabilities between workflows and adapting to variations in site conditions. Origin uses data from ongoing deployments to improve the model’s capabilities, performance and generalisation across tasks and environments over time.
Origin has been deployment-focused right from the beginning and deployed its first robots on job sites in New York within 10 months of its founding. Today, OG-1 is being deployed across commercial spaces, multi-family apartments, data centers, hotels and warehouses. It works alongside construction crews, taking on physically demanding tasks and hazardous work at height, while crews handle site mapping and material replenishment. The company is now preparing for customer pilots globally.
“Every customer we work with has more demand and project backlogs than their teams can deliver. They’re leaving revenue on the table because they don’t have enough skilled people, and demand is only growing. Over the last century, construction has only mechanized or automated heavy exterior work. But much of the skilled work inside the building, which accounts for more than 65% of the construction timelines, is still done by hand. We started Origin to bring physical AI to interior trades,” said Yogesh Ghaturle, co-founder and CEO of Origin. “We think of Origin as a time machine for construction, helping crews complete work faster while moving the industry toward autonomous job sites. Wall finishing and painting are only our starting trades; our ambition is to automate the full range of interior trades so contractors can build faster with consistent quality.”
The announcement comes as investment in construction robotics accelerates. Zacua's Construction Robotics Report 2026, published with Hilti Ventures and 94 Ventures, found that the sector attracted $1.36 billion in venture funding in the first three quarters of 2025, up 125% from the $612 million raised in all of 2024, while robots still account for less than 0.03% of global construction spend. The report attributes the shift to robotics and AI that have finally matured enough for the dust, clutter and half-finished spaces of a live job site, the same conditions OG-1 was built and tested in.
Origin's platform is ready for manufacturing at scale, and the company is targeting 150 robots deployed by the end of 2027. It plans to support additional interior trades like taping, drywall installation, drilling & conduit installation, using the same hardware platform and Construction Action Model. Zacua will support that expansion through its network of contractors, developers and manufacturers across the Physical Industries, and Vivin Hegde has joined Origin's board as a director.
Origin was founded in early 2025 by Yogesh Ghaturle, Ashish Daga and Tushar Makkar. Yogesh previously founded Perpule, a cloud POS company serving merchants across India and Southeast Asia, which Amazon acquired in 2021. Tushar heads autonomy and brings a decade of experience building AI systems at scale, most recently leading AI teams at Eightfold AI. Ashish leads hardware and previously built precision automation hardware at Morphle Labs, a digital pathology scanner company.
“We spent 18 months building before coming out of stealth because we wanted to prove what our robots could do on real job sites.” added Yogesh. “Today, our robots are already working at three times human speed, delivering human-level quality and generalising across different site conditions. Now we’re focused on bringing that capability to more sites and more trades.”
About Origin
Origin is a full-stack physical AI company building general-purpose robots for interior construction. Its flagship robot, OG-1, is powered by Origin’s Construction Action Model, built specifically for construction and trained using high-fidelity simulations and deployment data from live job sites. The Construction Action Model enables OG-1 to work autonomously in changing job-site conditions, while the modular hardware platform allows the robot to take on additional interior trades over time. Starting with wall finishing and painting, Origin is building toward the full range of interior construction tasks. The company deployed its first robots on job sites in New York within 10 months of founding. Origin is headquartered in San Francisco and is actively deploying robots across construction sites in the United States and Europe. For more information, visit www.origin.tech.
About Zacua Ventures
Zacua Ventures is a global early-stage venture capital firm investing in technologies transforming the world's Physical Industries, including construction, manufacturing, energy, mining and infrastructure. Backed by a global network of industry leaders, Zacua partners with founders developing solutions that address the sector's most pressing challenges – from labor shortages and fragmented workflows to aging infrastructure and industrial productivity. Drawing on deep operational expertise and strategic industry relationships, Zacua helps portfolio companies accelerate commercialization and scale technologies that are reshaping the built world. For more information, visit zacuaventures.com.
About Accel
Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Bumble, CrowdStrike, Fiverr, Flipkart, Freshworks, Qualtrics, Scale, Segment, Slack, Spotify, Squarespace, Tenable, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 40+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more, visit www.accel.com.
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