Baukunst at CES 2026: Reflections & Recap

Baukunst showed up in a big way at CES this year. CES is always a good opportunity to meet with longtime collaborators and new founders in person, and for thinking about what’s coming in technology.

This year our portfolio company Eyebot had a huge booth, and it was great to see a long line of CES attendees curious to try it out and get a new prescription. Eyebot has been picking up a ton of traction recently and was even named Best Health Tech of CES by Engadget.

One thing we were eager to check out at CES is humanoid robots. In years past CES was a zoo of IoT devices; this year was a veritable army of robots. We had a great time walking around and giving them off-the-cuff ratings.

More seriously, we’ve been thinking a lot about AI colleagues recently, especially in a manufacturing context. We’ve been somewhat skeptical internally about robots in the shape of homo sapiens—is this the correct form factor for a bot that will mostly be doing repetitive tasks?

But there’s no doubt that the funding market for this category is large and growing. 2025 saw around $7B in funding into humanoid robotics companies and foundation models for general purpose AI like Physical Intelligence, not to mention untold R&D budgets from the likes of Tesla, Google, and NVIDIA. We expect that progress here will be rapid, and that next year’s CES will see more elaborate demos and faster physical movements.

One final thought: 2026 is shaping up to be the year of AI orchestration frameworks for agentic coding tools. In a manufacturing context, these same kinds of software tools will be important: orchestration, factory digital twins, robot fleet management, and AI training infrastructure. If you’re working on this, reach out.

Exploring the CES show floor is a great way to read the tea leaves of how people are thinking and relating to technology. Many of the AI-enabled devices we saw promised to deliver and act on information previously inaccessible to us. Here’s a little monologue about this aesthetic of knowability.

It wouldn’t be CES without a good party, and we hosted the Baukunst collective for a private party at Glitter Gulch tiki bar. We had a hundred collective members and friends come by to celebrate the week, compare notes on what we learned, and show off new projects.

This last one is a recap of our whole CES journey. Shout out to Camille, our newest team member, for all the amazing video documentation. See you next year, CES!