Brian Stoner

A year ago, when I left Tesla Optimus to co-found Mondo, I made a promise to my son: I would build him a little robot buddy — something like the robot friends from our bedtime stories, but real. At the time, it was not really a product statement. It was a father’s promise to a little boy I love more than anything — a boy who loved stories about a child and his robot companion. Over the past year, that promise slowly became real — Beni the robot. Beni follows you, films you in 4K, moves across different terrain, jumps over obstacles, captures moments from new angles, and helps turn your clips into highlights. We designed it for families, pets, creators, athletes, and anyone who wants a robot that feels less like a gadget and more like a little sidekick. I’m deeply grateful to the Mondo team for turning countless prototypes, failures, late-night tests, and difficult tradeoffs into something people can finally meet. Although we have only just launched on Kickstarter, this world-class team is already deep in the “production hell”, and we expect to ship the product in the next few months. I’m also especially thankful to my family. Building hardware takes time, patience, and sacrifice from the people closest to you. Beni would not exist without their love and support. My son often visits our office and plays with Beni. Watching them together has reminded me why I started this journey in the first place. I do not want him to grow up thinking of robots only as distant machines in labs, factories, or videos. I want him to grow up in a world where robots can feel close, friendly, safe, and present — something he can play with, trust, and remember as part of his childhood. For the robotics community: Beni may look cute, but it is a serious robotics product. We used reinforcement learning to train Beni’s motion policies, with NVIDIA Isaac Lab and Google MuJoCo as part of our training and validation pipeline. Under the playful exterior are real robotics problems in locomotion, perception, control, and sim-to-real transfer. The lessons we are learning from Beni also directly inform our future humanoid product. Different form factor, same belief: advanced robotics should not feel distant or abstract. It should become close, present, and part of everyday life. For my son, Beni began as a promise. For Mondo Robotics, it is just the first step. Meet Beni: mondorobotics.com/

Brazil's authoritarian age verification law became active this month. It won't be implemented by GrapheneOS. Complying would require integrating a mandatory process for each user where a third party service checks government identification and confirms a match using the camera.

Our Identifier Rotation feature (formerly exclusive to Obscura, one of TIME Best Inventions '25) is NOW LIVE for Cape users on select devices. With Identifier Rotation, you can appear as a new person on the network every 24 hours, disrupting tracking and profiling by your carrier and third parties. Update your Cape app, and check Experimental Features. Read more about how it works here: cape.co/blog/product-feature…