Dynamic Creatures, a Boston Dynamics spinout, emerged from stealth this week with a platform for mobile, interactive character robots targeting entertainment and hospitality venues3,8,12.
The Boston-based company is Boston Dynamics' official entertainment and hospitality partner and is already working with an unnamed major theme park and retailer on guest-facing character experiences7. CEO Marc Theermann, formerly Boston Dynamics' chief strategy officer and a senior leader at Google, co-founded the company with CTO Farbod Farshidian, a robotics researcher and former research leader at the Robotics and AI Institute9. Farshidian's prior work included learning-based control for Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid, high-speed quadrupedal locomotion, and sim-to-real skill transfer.
SnowJay and the technical stack
The company's software platform, SnowJay, combines real-time perception, learning-based control, behavioral programming, character design, and costuming into a unified operating layer for its robots2. Rather than repeating scripted animations, the system is designed to let characters react to what is happening around them, responding to individual guests in real time5. Dynamic Creatures writes the software and sources hardware from Unitree, AgiBot, and Boston Dynamics4. Two of those three hardware suppliers, Unitree and AgiBot, are Chinese; Boston Dynamics itself is majority owned by Hyundai.
The company has developed two in-house prototype characters: a purple poodle named Danielle, built on Boston Dynamics' Spot platform, and a Tyrolean mountain troll1. It has also hired puppeteers to help define different emotions for its robots. First customer deployments will use what the company calls "assisted autonomy," a mixture of teleoperation and autonomous behavior, with operators controlling the robots to gather training data. Dynamic Creatures hopes to begin those deployments in early 2027.
Business model and safety
Dynamic Creatures plans to offer leasing models for characters built on existing robotic platforms, which it says can be deployed within months. It is also building fully original robots tailored to a customer's brand, environment, and creative requirements. Initial target venues include theme parks, hotels, resorts, casinos, museums, cruise ships, and live entertainment spaces, with potential expansion into luxury retail and automotive brand experience centers.
Theermann told Semafor that safety has to be rethought "from the ground up" for robots people will be comfortable hugging. Engineering challenges specific to this category include costumes that block sensor vision and trap heat. Boston Dynamics' vice president of marketing and communications, Nikolas Noel, said character development "just isn't our core space or area of expertise," framing the spinout as complementary rather than competitive.
The company is backed by Eniac Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Heliad, Sunshine Lake, and BlueGrass Ventures, with angel investments from Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert and Lukas Ziegler. Dynamic Creatures declined to disclose the funding amount.
ANALYSIS By pairing third-party quadruped and humanoid hardware with a proprietary perception-and-behavior software layer, Dynamic Creatures is positioning itself as a platform company rather than a hardware manufacturer, a model that could allow faster iteration across venue types but leaves it dependent on external supply chains, two-thirds of which run through China.