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Robotic Car Detailing? Meet HABIT, the Startup Bringing AI to Local Services

Ksenia Yevtushenko -

HABIT is a robotics startup founded in 2025 that is taking a bold and practical approach to automating labor-intensive neighborhood services. Based in El Segundo, California, and supported by Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch with Diana Hu as its primary partner, HABIT is rethinking how physical tasks like car detailing, hotel upkeep, and home services are performed — starting with one of the most in-demand, yet outdated, services in America: the car wash.

The founding team, composed of seasoned professionals from Twitch, Amazon, Radiant Nuclear, and JPMorgan, recognized a massive inefficiency in the way physical labor is being approached. Rather than asking businesses to invest in their own humanoid robots or robotic fleets — an expensive, complex, and often unrealistic expectation — HABIT offers an entirely new model. Think of it as “robotics-as-a-service,” deployed at the neighborhood level.

The startup’s first offering? A robotic car detailing service called Orangedetail, which merges the speed of tunnel washes with the precision and pricing potential of hand-done car detailing. It’s not just about making chores easier; it’s about creating scalable, intelligent, robotic labor that small businesses and individuals can finally afford.

Why Start with Car Detailing?

Car detailing is a surprisingly large and underserved market. In 2025 alone, Americans are projected to spend $4.2 billion on hand car detailing services — a testament to the fact that, despite automation in many sectors, consumers still value the paint-preserving quality of a professional touch.

At the same time, the traditional options are deeply flawed:

  • Automatic car washes are fast but abrasive, often leaving scratches and are incapable of handling premium services like ceramic coating.
  • Human detailers offer better quality but come with long waits, high costs, and inconsistent outcomes.

HABIT saw this as the ideal launchpad: a fragmented service ripe for disruption by reliable, AI-powered robotics. Their first product, orangedetail, is designed to replicate the meticulous care of human detailers with the efficiency and consistency of machines — delivering the best of both worlds to customers and businesses alike.

How Does HABIT’s Technology Work?

The heart of HABIT’s innovation lies in its multi-stage robotic training framework. Inspired by advances in large-scale AI models and reinforcement learning, the startup has developed a system to distill general robotic intelligence into finely tuned, task-specific agents.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Foundation Models: Start with large, general-purpose robotic AI trained on a wide range of physical tasks.
  2. Knowledge Distillation: Extract relevant capabilities and distill them into smaller, more efficient student models.
  3. Fine-Tuning: Apply supervised learning on real-world data to specialize the agents for specific tasks — like exterior car detailing.
  4. Reinforcement Learning: Simulate various real-world scenarios to help agents refine their actions and responses in a virtual environment before deployment.

This approach results in consumer-ready robotic experts that are highly specialized, low-cost, and ready to serve real-world use cases. HABIT doesn’t just automate — it builds reliable, domain-specific intelligence into every machine.

What Makes HABIT’s Model Different from Other Robotics Startups?

While many robotics companies are building humanoid robots for general labor, HABIT has taken a ground-up, service-first approach. Rather than expecting businesses or consumers to buy, customize, maintain, and operate robots themselves, HABIT manages the entire stack — from infrastructure and maintenance to training and operation.

In essence, HABIT is creating robotic neighborhood centers that act as local hubs for on-demand robotic services. These hubs will eventually serve:

  • Car owners, with robotic car detailing
  • Hotels, with automated room service and maintenance
  • Retail stores, with robotic cleaning and restocking
  • Homes, with everything from exterior washing to lawn care

By avoiding the pitfalls of high upfront costs, confusing customization, and the need for in-house fleet management, HABIT positions itself as the middle layer between consumers and robotics, much like AWS did for cloud computing.

Who’s Behind HABIT?

HABIT was founded by two longtime friends and UC Berkeley alumni:

  • Harish Palani, previously an AI/ML Research Scientist at Amazon and Twitch, with a deep background in deep learning and robotics.
  • Michael [last name not provided], who brings a dual background as a Senior Software Engineer at Radiant Nuclear and an Investment Banker at JPMorgan.

Their complementary skill sets — technical depth in AI and operational expertise in scaling — make them uniquely qualified to tackle the multifaceted challenges of deploying robotics at scale.

Their shared vision? A future where robotics become as accessible and dependable as local services — all without requiring users to own or understand a robot.

How Big Is the Market Opportunity?

The U.S. car wash and detailing market alone is worth $20 billion annually, with $4.2 billion specifically tied to manual detailing. One operator with locations in just 21 states was able to generate $1 billion in revenue last year.

Add to that the untapped potential of robotic services across retail, hospitality, and residential sectors, and HABIT is clearly aiming for a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. In a world where time, quality, and convenience increasingly dictate consumer behavior, robotic labor isn’t just a novelty — it’s a competitive necessity.

What Comes After Car Detailing?

While orangedetail is the company’s first vertical, HABIT has its eyes set on a much broader vision. Future services under the HABIT umbrella may include:

  • Robotic cleaning services for storefronts and hotels
  • On-demand robotic delivery of groceries or room service
  • Exterior home cleaning and maintenance
  • Lawn and landscape care using autonomous robotics

By operating through neighborhood-based HABIT centers, the company can scale without the need for every individual or business to own specialized equipment. It’s a franchise-like model for robotics, where HABIT owns the intelligence and operations, and the end user simply requests service.

How Is HABIT Positioned in the Broader Robotics Landscape?

HABIT sits at the intersection of robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) and neighborhood automation infrastructure. Unlike startups focused solely on humanoid form factors or research-heavy industrial robotics, HABIT emphasizes deployment and utility.

In doing so, it addresses three core problems:

  1. Access: Robotics for small businesses and consumers, without the ownership cost.
  2. Specialization: Purpose-built agents trained for high-precision tasks.
  3. Scalability: Neighborhood centers as a scalable infrastructure layer across the U.S.

This approach turns what was once a sci-fi vision of robots in everyday life into a practical, affordable, and real-world service, one detail at a time.

What’s Next for HABIT?

HABIT is currently focused on launching and scaling Orangedetail, the robotic car detailing service that will serve as its flagship use case. In parallel, the team is preparing for national expansion — identifying key markets, building robotic infrastructure, and refining the performance of their AI agents.

Ultimately, HABIT aims to become the go-to platform for robotic neighborhood services, redefining how Americans access labor, starting with their cars and expanding into every corner of their lives.