Pepper

Pepper arrived in 2014 from Aldebaran, the French robotics firm SoftBank had bought in 2012, a waist-high humanoid with a tablet on its chest and a face designed to read and mirror human emotion. About 27,000 were built for stores, hotels, and living rooms, where they mostly stood around as costly novelties that struggled with the conversations they had been sold to hold. SoftBank halted production in 2021 as demand stalled, then stopped funding Aldebaran after years of losses. Aldebaran filed for bankruptcy in February 2025 and was placed in receivership on June 3, 2025, its staff laid off. This entry records that European death: Aldebaran, the company that built Pepper, is gone. The robot itself has a Japanese afterlife. SoftBank Robotics kept its home business out of the liquidation and in February 2026 launched Pepper+, an updated model offered on rental in Japan, so the product line survives there under different ownership, the same shape as Argo's technology outliving Argo. Pepper had been the public face of the social-robot dream, which is why its long, slow failure was watched so closely, and why its partial survival deserves the footnote.

Founded

2014-06

Shut down

2025-06-03

Funding raised

Undisclosed

Years alive

11

Founders

Bruno Maisonnier