Furhat Robotics was founded in 2014 by Samer Al Moubayed, Preben Wik, Jonas Beskow, and Gabriel Skantze, most of whom were affiliated with the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. The company emerged from Al Moubayed's doctoral research in speech technology and artificial intelligence. He had previously studied computer science in Damascus, Syria, where he focused on emotional speech synthesis, and later completed a master’s degree in speech and language technology in Belgium before pursuing a PhD at KTH. While working on a social robot prototype at KTH, Al Moubayed gained support from KTH Innovation, which encouraged commercialization of academic research. After sharing a video of the robot online, Al Moubayed was contacted by Disney’s R&D team and subsequently traveled to Pittsburgh in 2014 to collaborate on development and receive user feedback. Later that year, he established Furhat Robotics in Stockholm with support from KTH and collaborators from Disney. Daniel Waterhouse from Balderton also joined Furhat’s board of directors. In 2019, the company collaborated with the Swedish recruitment firm TNG to develop Tengai, a robot intended to support more structured and consistent interview processes. In January 2022, Furhat Robotics acquired Misty Robotics, a U.S.-based social robotics company - incorporating its product line and allowing it to use Misty's technologies in its own products. The acquisition was described by Furhat as complementing Furhat’s stationary robots with a mobile platform and broadening its hardware capabilities. As of 2025, the company's robotic platforms have been used by university research teams and companies in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East (see a full list of Furhat's research and commercial applications
here). ==Products==