In a Mecwacare residential home in Ballarat, staff work alongside a four-foot robot that is brightly coloured, speaks up to 90 languages, occasionally blows bubbles and remembers details such as the songs residents grew up with.
Grace Brown built the first of these machines, called Abi, in her bedroom during a Melbourne lockdown because she felt lonely.
Five years on, the 26-year-old mechatronics engineer is chief executive of Andromeda Robotics, a Melbourne-headquartered company valued at roughly $100 million with offices in San Francisco, and convinced that the robot she started as a hobby will become something far larger than aged care.
“The hardest part is not what people expect,” Brown says. “It’s not the engineering. It’s not the fundraising. It’s the fact that we are effectively writing the rule book for how a robot should behave around someone who is lonely, grieving, confused, or dying – in real time, in real homes, with real families watching. There is no textbook for that.”
This month, Andromeda deployed its 22nd Abi across Victorian not-for-profit provider Mecwacare, completing what the company calls the largest rollout of empathetic humanoid companion robots in Australian aged care. More than 1500 residents are now sharing their days with one. An undisclosed first US customer, on the West Coast, goes live shortly.
Australia faces a projected shortfall of at least 110,000 aged-care workers by 2030, according to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia. In Brown’s own research, 40 per cent of Australian residents do not get a single visitor in a given month; in the US, it’s 60 per cent.
“Loneliness at the end of life isn’t the absence of people,” she says. “Most residents are surrounded by people. It’s the absence of someone who knows you. Who remembers the name of your first dog. Who notices you’ve gone quiet today in a way you weren’t yesterday.”
Andromeda is not alone in the market. Israel’s Intuition Robotics makes ElliQ, a lamp-like tabletop companion that last month became the first social AI robot fully reimbursed by a US Medicaid program, in Washington state. Japan’s Paro therapeutic seal has been deployed in care homes globally for two decades. Groove X’s Lovot offers a furry, pet-like alternative, and South Korea’s ChatGPT-powered Hyodol dolls are in more than 12,000 homes.
Andromeda’s bet is that a full-sized humanoid designed explicitly for empathy, closer in spirit to Pixar’s fictional healthcare robot Baymax than a lamp, is the form factor that wins.
Its $23 million Series A funding round last September, led by San Francisco’s Forerunner Ventures with CSIRO-linked Main Sequence, Rethink Impact and Perth-based Purpose Ventures, funded Brown’s move to the US and Andromeda’s American launch. The company has not disclosed its current valuation.
Mecwacare says the early evidence is positive: the company’s research found 74 per cent of staff reported observing reduced resident agitation when Abi was present, with the robot rated nine out of 10 for overall satisfaction. Mecwacare chief executive Anne McCormack says staff now call Abi their “happiness assistant”.
That is not the same as a clinical trial, however. A 2024 Nature feature flagged a thin evidence base, risks of infantilisation for dementia residents, and the possibility such technology ends up affordable only to the best-resourced homes.
Brown acknowledges all of it. “The pushback usually comes before Abi arrives. Not after,” she says. “The people most sceptical in theory are frequently the ones who, within a week of deployment, are asking when Abi can sing a specific song their mother used to know.”
There’s also the not insignificant question of harm. Andromeda has had what she calls “minor incidents”, interactions in which something Abi said did not land well. None, she says, has injured a resident, and every home has a named support lead who can pause the robot at any moment. “We run post-incident reviews the same way a hospital does after a clinical event.”
The more pressing issue for Brown, and for Andromeda, is regulatory silence. Abi is not a medical device, not a toy, and not a member of staff, so it currently sits in a grey area.
“The defaults being set right now will shape how billions of people eventually experience these machines,” she says.
Aged care, she argues, is just the first step in a much larger goal. She’s confident that billions of robots are about to enter human environments, and almost none are being built to read a room. Andromeda wants to be the “social operating system” every one of those machines eventually needs.
“If the social OS works here, it works anywhere,” she says. “The scale of what we’re building is a $100 billion company at minimum.”
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
