Khameleon, a Silicon Valley startup building humanoid robots for hotel housekeeping, has closed a pre-seed funding round. Terms were not disclosed. The round included Korean investors Bass Ventures, Naver D2SF, Mashup Ventures, The Ventures, and Schmidt, as well as institutional backers from the US and UK.

What Khameleon is building goes beyond automating a single cleaning motion. Its humanoid robots move through hotel rooms and handle the full housekeeping sequence from start to finish — the kind of repetitive, end-to-end workflow that has historically required human labor. Crucially, the system works within a hotel’s existing layout and operations with no modifications required, keeping the deployment barrier low. The company also argues that robot-cleaned rooms can deliver a more consistent, objectively verifiable standard of cleanliness — a potential boost for guest satisfaction scores.

Khameleon recently landed a spot in the Global Track of TIPS (Tech Incubator Program for Startups), South Korea’s Ministry of SMEs and Startups-backed accelerator program. Recommended by Mashup Ventures, the selection unlocks up to approximately $806,000 (KRW 1.2 billion) in R&D support for the team’s work on multi-joint robot hardware and AI systems tailored to cleaning environments.

The team behind Khameleon reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley robotics talent. CEO Donghoon Lee earned his PhD from Seoul National University before spending years at Tesla working on autonomous driving and humanoid robotics, then moved to Apple to develop 3D scanning technology. Flanking him are a CTO from Meta and a Chief Robotics Officer from Bear Robotics — a combination that gives the company serious depth across both the hardware and software sides of the stack.

Khameleon operates out of Silicon Valley with a Korean subsidiary handling development and global operations in parallel. The immediate priority is getting its first robot to a deployable, service-ready state and validating it through proof-of-concept trials with hotel partners. On the hiring side, the company plans to scale up its engineering team in Korea and deepen ties with hotel operators in both markets.

“Khameleon has built something rare — a team with hands-on experience across AI models, computer vision, and hardware at the world’s top tech companies,” said Eunwoo Park, Partner at Mashup Ventures. “The global hotel industry has been dealing with stubborn labor shortages for years, and we think Khameleon’s grounded, practical approach to automation gives them a real competitive edge.”

“The goal is simple: let robots handle the hard, repetitive work so that people on the ground can focus on things that actually need a human touch,” said CEO Donghoon Lee. “Hotels are just the starting point. The same model applies anywhere you have structured, repetitive tasks — offices, hospitals, you name it.”