Alexander Koch

Koch holds an M.Sc. in computer science from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). On his personal website he writes that he has spent almost a decade working on scalable robot learning algorithms, with main interests in language-conditioned meta and hierarchical reinforcement learning, imitation learning and low-cost robot hardware, and that his vision is “to build a general AI for robots.”⁠[1]

His personal website also lists him as a Z Fellow.⁠[1]

On April 3, 2024 Tyler CowenTyler CowenTyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University and chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center; in 2003 he co-founded the economics blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, he has written books including The Great Stagnation and Stubborn Attachments, and he hosts the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2021.Open the full entry published the 33rd Emergent Ventures cohort on Marginal Revolution; Koch was included and described as “Germany, Bay Area, robotics and robot learning.”⁠[2]

Koch is the co-founder and chief executive of the San Francisco robotics company Tau Robotics. In July 2026 Tau Robotics publicly launched a home-cleaning service performed by humanoid robots at $30 an hour, open to invited San Francisco households as a pilot for 1,000 households.⁠[3][4]

In an ABC7 interview aired on July 30, 2026 Koch said: “Yeah, yesterday we made it public that we are starting to offer a cleaning service with humanoids in SF.” He said the service would mainly make the home-cleaning market bigger, and that tasks such as vacuum cleaning were “working pretty well already.”⁠[3]

Tau’s robots are operated jointly by remote technicians and AI: technicians wearing VR goggles see through the robots’ cameras, supervise the AI controlling them and step in when a robot gets stuck. Koch said the robot “cannot do everything on its own. It doesn’t know how to walk upstairs, for example. It doesn’t know where to vacuum.” Each robot costs $50,000 to make.⁠[4]

In August 2026 Koch said the company planned to reach 1,000 cleanings a week in San Francisco by 2027 and expand to other U.S. cities and internationally by 2028, and estimated that technicians would be phased out around 2028 or 2029 as the robots became more self-sufficient. “Initially, they will be trained to imitate human performance, and then they will be trained to exceed human performance,” he said.⁠[4]

On data security Koch said Tau has “full control” over the data it collects: “The camera system, the networking and the computers are all our own.” In mid-August 2026 he said the company had eight humanoids, most of them used for development.⁠[4][5]

University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry robotics professor Ken Goldberg said humanoid robots remain relatively clumsy, can fall over and hit people nearby, and estimated it would take about another decade before they could effectively perform at-home services such as cleaning.⁠[4]

Koch published low_cost_robot on GitHub under the MIT license, with files to build and control a low-cost follower robot arm and a leader arm for teleoperating it. The follower arm costs about $250 and the leader arm about $180, both using Dynamixel servos, and the leader-arm design is based on the GELLO project. As of November 2026 the repository had about 3,400 stars on GitHub.⁠[6]

The later Koch v1.1 is a version of his original arm modified for easier assembly and is suggested for use with Hugging Face’s robot-learning library LeRobot, whose documentation includes a Koch v1.1 setup page.⁠[7][8]

As of November 2026 Tau Robotics’ cleaning service covered Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area on an invitation basis; it usually sends two robots per cleaning, dropped off with a supervisor, for dusting, wiping surfaces, cleaning toilets, vacuuming and mopping. The robots are not fully autonomous: a human supervisor decides when to let them work autonomously and when to take over.⁠[9]

Tau Robotics: Official website: https://tau-robotics.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6][1]

Personal website: https://www.alexkoch.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/alexkoch_ai (opens in a new window).⁠[1][10]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexkoch-ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1][2]