A lavender poodle with purple eyelids, movable eyes, a mouth and legs is not what Boston Dynamics is famous for. Yet Danielle, as the poodle is called, walks on the same Spot quadruped that spent years opening doors in industrial demo reels. She is one of two prototypes from Dynamic Creatures, a Boston company that emerged from stealth on September 8, 2026 to sell interactive character robots to theme parks, hotels and cruise ships.
The pedigree is exactly what you would expect. CEO Marc Theermann was chief strategy officer at Boston Dynamics and, before that, a senior leader at Google. CTO Farbod Farshidian led research at the Robotics and AI Institute. Dynamic Creatures is Boston Dynamics’ official entertainment and hospitality partner, and Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert put in money personally as an angel investor alongside Lukas Ziegler. The institutional backers are Eniac Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Heliad, Sunshine Lake and BlueGrass Ventures. The company has not disclosed how much it raised.
The second prototype, Hugo, is a Tyrolean mountain troll built on Spot as well, and closer to a friendly yeti than to anything that lives under a bridge. Both are internal demonstrations rather than products, but they show the pitch: a character that walks up to you rather than a fixed animatronic that waits for you to walk past it.
Underneath the fur sits SnowJay, the company’s integrated AI and robotics platform, effectively an operating system for a character. It pulls together:
- learning-based control and real-time perception
- behavioral programming and character design
- costuming, which matters more than it sounds when a robot has to move in a suit
The motion itself is trained rather than choreographed. Dynamic Creatures uses motion capture, animation, NVIDIA tools and reinforcement learning to teach robots behaviors that read as organic instead of canned. Theermann told The Robot Report the team has gone further than software: “We want to become the best at human-robot interaction… we’ve actually hired puppeteers to help us figure out different emotions.”
Beyond Spot, the platform also runs on Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid and is compatible with Unitree robots. That matters commercially. Building a character on an existing platform, rather than engineering a bespoke machine around a licensed property, lets Dynamic Creatures put something in front of guests in months instead of the multi-year timelines custom animatronics usually demand.
The target list runs across theme parks, hotels, resorts, casinos, museums, cruise ships and live venues, with luxury retail and automotive experience centers named as later expansion. The company says it is already engaged with a major theme park and a retailer, neither identified. First customer deployments are planned for early 2027, starting with managed pilots that mix teleoperation with autonomy, which is a sober way of admitting that a robot surrounded by excited children is a hard autonomy problem.
Theermann’s framing of the goal is less technical: “Our characters do more than perform for a crowd. They can respond to an individual and create small moments of wonder that people remember.”
