Moxie: a children’s robot kept alive by open source after its servers went off

A $1,499 friend built with people from Pixar and Jim Henson

Moxie was a children’s robot made by Embodied, a company founded by Paolo Pirjanian, a former chief technology officer of iRobot, and Maja Matarić, a robotics professor at USC. It was unveiled in April 2020 for $1,499 including twelve months of subscription, after which owners paid $59.99 a month. It had a blue body with a curved screen for a face and used seven motors for body language. People from Pixar and Jim Henson worked on it alongside child-development specialists. Moxie talked with children around a weekly theme such as kindness or empathy, and parents followed their child’s progress in an app. At launch the company said 90% of processing happened on the robot and that camera images stayed on the device.

An investor who pulled out, and servers that went dark

The price fell to about $1,000 plus $39 a month in 2022, and to $799 by the time the company closed. By then Moxie depended on the cloud and used a large language model. In December 2024 Embodied announced it was shutting down: “We had secured a lead investor who was prepared to close the round. However, at the last minute, they withdrew leaving us with no viable options to continue operations.” It offered no refunds. Before closing, it released OpenMoxie, a local server owners could run on their own computer. Only robots that had installed a final update could connect to it, and the company’s cloud went off in January 2025. A new company, Moxie Robots, later relaunched Moxie, but in October 2026 its website says the robots are no longer available for sale.

Children who begged to save their friend

In a 2020 study published by Embodied, twelve autistic or developmentally delayed children used Moxie at a school for six weeks and showed more social behaviour such as eye contact. Most of the authors worked for the company, and there was no control group. When the shutdown became known, videos of crying children spread. Researchers who later studied the episode wrote: “When Embodied Inc. abruptly shut down its Moxie robot, social media videos of children sobbing and pleading to ‘save’ their friend vividly illustrated this distress.” The consumer group PIRG reported that even after OpenMoxie appeared, few less technical families managed to use it.

A way out, written for developers

Moxie followed Jibo’s path. Its functions lived on the company’s servers, and when the company went, the robot stopped. The difference is that Embodied left owners a way to take over the server. But using it meant installing the server yourself and setting up your own OpenAI account. The last tool for saving a robot bought for a child was, in effect, a developer’s manual. Compared with AIBO, which a repair shop kept alive, a path stayed open, but few families could take it.

If the company disappears, could an ordinary family use the way to keep this robot alive?

What we haven’t confirmed

• Units sold, and total funding raised
• When Moxie switched to a large language model, and which one
• The terms of the takeover by Moxie Robots, and reports of a second server shutdown in 2026 (found only on a forum and Wikipedia)
• How many Moxies run on OpenMoxie today