Catenaa, Tuesday, September 01, 2026- Pollen Robotics, the French subsidiary of Hugging Face, has sold more than 10,000 units of its Microduck robot in the week since it went on sale.
According to CNBC, the sales revenue has crossed $4 million at the $399 price point. The volume of orders has pushed estimated delivery dates for new customers past Christmas 2026.
The 25-centimeter-tall robot weighs under 800 grams and runs on Rockchip’s RK3566 processor, a chip from the Shanghai-listed Chinese company that incorporates technology licensed from British semiconductor firm ARM, according to CNBC.
For the first six months of the year, Rockchip posted operating revenue of 2.88 billion yuan ($428 million), a 40% increase from the same period a year earlier, with net profit excluding one-time items up more than 60%.
Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, called Rockchip a “key vendor” for AI running locally on hardware rather than in the cloud, and said its chips show up frequently in machine-vision applications such as object detection and image recognition.
“While it has massive footprint, the company chips are not designed for complex edge AI devices as they lack the compute resources,” Su told the outlet.
The Microduck carries a camera, a depth sensor, two IMUs, 15 motors, and a jointed beak for grasping objects, and the company says it can walk, crouch, right itself after tipping over, and roller-skate.
Four colorways are available: Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky, with first deliveries targeted for North America, Europe, and the UK.
Pollen Robotics built the Microduck with developers in mind, positioning it as a testbed for physical AI research where behaviors trained in virtual environments can be transferred directly to the hardware.
The accompanying SDK, simulation environment, and full reinforcement learning pipeline have been posted to GitHub, the company said.
Thomas Wolf, a co-founder of Hugging Face, noted in a Monday social media post that consumers had started tracking the Microduck supply chain as orders surged.
The Microduck is Pollen Robotics’ second robot since Hugging Face acquired the French startup in April 2025. The first, Reachy Mini, also sold more than 10,000 units, Pollen Robotics said.
Hugging Face is reportedly in discussions to be acquired by Nvidia at a valuation of $13 billion, according to TechCrunch.
