Moxie (Embodied)
Moxie (Embodied), $800 AI companion robot for children, died 2025-01-30. Cause of death: A funding round fell through and the cloud brain went dark — every robot in every household bricked overnight.
- Born
- 2020
- Died
- 2025-01-30
- Cause of death
- A funding round fell through and the cloud brain went dark — every robot in every household bricked overnight.
“Volunteers built OpenMoxie to bring it back. It shouldn't have been necessary.”
The obituary
Moxie was an $800 AI companion robot for children aged five to ten, built by Embodied and shipped from 2020. It wasn't a toy in the marketing sense — it ran structured social-emotional exercises, told stories, and held conversations, and both the parents who bought it and the clinicians who studied it largely reported that kids genuinely bonded with it. Its brain, however, lived in the cloud, on infrastructure paid for by venture funding.
In late 2024 a critical funding round collapsed. On January 30, 2025 the servers went dark, and every Moxie in every household stopped mid-relationship — no local fallback mode, no wind-down, an $800 robot reduced to a paperweight that a child had been talking to the day before. Parents were left to improvise an explanation for a death the company had engineered into the product from day one.
The silver lining was built by strangers: a community of engineers and parents created OpenMoxie, an open-source project that restored some functionality to the orphaned hardware. It stands as both the warmest story in this graveyard and its sharpest indictment — the users refused to let the companion die, and they shouldn't have had to. Moxie rests in the annex because it wasn't a girlfriend app, but no resident better demonstrates the vertical's core defect: a companion whose continued existence depends on someone else's runway.
Sources
Deaths, lobotomies, and vanishings are recorded as part of our tracking methodology — the newsletter carries the obituaries as they happen.