Demand for $399 'Microduck' Robot Surges After Parent Hugging Face Acquired by Nvidia

A new AI-powered robotic duck from Pollen Robotics has seen a massive surge in demand, generating over $2.6 million in sales within 24 hours of its launch. The interest in the $399 'Microduck' was reportedly catalyzed by news that its parent company, the open-source AI platform Hugging Face, was being acquired by Nvidia for $12.9 billion, as announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on September 3, according to a report from Time Weekly.

Sales Frenzy Creates Reseller Market

Pollen Robotics opened global pre-orders for the desktop robot on August 27, and at its peak, the device was selling at a rate of one unit every four seconds. This intense demand has pushed the official order backlog out for several months.

The long wait times have fueled a burgeoning grey market, particularly in regions where the product is not officially sold. Resellers on e-commerce platforms are offering the Microduck for prices ranging from approximately $450 to over $860, often requiring significant non-refundable deposits and wait times of up to six months. The reliability of these resellers is a concern, with some reportedly providing conflicting information about whether their products are genuine imports or domestically produced replicas.

Imitations Test IP Boundaries

The popularity of the Microduck has also spurred a wave of unauthorized imitations. Some manufacturers of these replicas claim they are permitted to do so because the project is open-source. However, this is a critical misunderstanding of the product's intellectual property.

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According to Pollen Robotics, while the Microduck's software development kit (SDK) and reinforcement learning training stack are available under an Apache-2.0 open-source license, the hardware itself is proprietary. The company has not released its bill of materials (BOM), CAD files, or assembly documents. "Pollen Robotics open-sourced the software platform, but they protected the hardware," explained Liu Pengfei, CEO of robotics firm Luwo Intelligence, in an interview with Time Weekly.

Not an 'iPhone Moment' for AI

Industry experts caution against viewing the Microduck's viral success as a breakthrough moment for consumer-grade embodied AI. Liu, whose own company had developed a similar bipedal robot, believes the device is more of a research and educational tool than a mass-market toy. He argues its primary value comes from its integration with Hugging Face's powerful open-source AI ecosystem.

"It's not like it's a very smart duck right out of the box; it needs to be trained," an industry practitioner told Time Weekly, noting that many of the intelligent behaviors shown in promotional videos are the result of direct remote control. Liu added that most current imitations are immature and cannot replicate the complex software-hardware integration required for stable performance. "This is not the 'iPhone moment' for embodied intelligence," he concluded.