In July 2024, a Toronto-based investor named Andrew Kiguel — the former chief executive of a publicly-traded cryptocurrency holding company called Tokens.com — acquired Abyss Creations, the San Marcos, California manufacturer that has, since 1996, been the dominant U.S. producer of hyper-realistic silicone humanoid figures sold primarily into the adult companionship market under the RealDoll brand. Kiguel rolled the acquisition into a new public entity called Realbotix Corp. (OTC: XBOTF), and rebranded the combined operation around an “embodied AI” thesis that positioned the company explicitly against the intensifying commercial humanoid-robot race. Where Tesla Optimus, Figure 02, Apptronik Apollo, Agility Digit, and the rest of the Bay Area humanoid cohort are being designed for warehouse logistics, manufacturing assembly, and eventually domestic chores, Realbotix is being designed for one-on-one personal connection — explicitly companionship-and-intimacy first, task-execution second, with the underlying hardware platform consisting of an animatronic robotic head module mated to a customized RealDoll silicone body that ships at price points between $8,000 and $20,000 per unit. The CES 2025 floor in Las Vegas had a Realbotix robot on display, in the same convention hall as the Atlas, Optimus, and Figure platforms, addressing what Kiguel publicly described as “a clear use case for companionship and for people who are looking for that type of intimacy” — language that, in the corporate-communications register of a publicly-traded company, is the closest thing the category has to a normalized commercial vocabulary.
This is the domain where the global humanoid robotics industry intersects with the loneliness epidemic, the declining marriage and birth rates of the developed world, the rise of the OnlyFans economy and the broader unbundling of physical and emotional intimacy from co-located human relationships, and the academic literature on human-machine emotional attachment that has been quietly building since David Levy published Love and Sex with Robots in 2007 and predicted that human-robot marriage would be legally recognized somewhere in the world by 2050. The structural observation that defines the category in 2026 is that the actual robotic hardware in this market is small — by every available estimate, the combined global installed base of dedicated intimate-companion robots (Realbotix Harmony units, EXDOLL and DS Doll animatronic heads, AI-Tech‘s Emma series, Synthea Amatus‘s Samantha) is in the low five figures of total units shipped, against an AI-companion-software user base measured in the tens of millions and a humanoid-robot industry whose combined venture-capital valuation exceeds $50 billion. The hardware deployment is, in industrial terms, a rounding error against the broader robotics economy. The cultural and demographic weight of the underlying use case is, by every available measure, the heaviest of any category in the field.
The Realbotix industrial story and the Matt McMullen genealogy
The U.S. flagship platform — and the one with the longest operational history — is the Harmony robotic head module developed by Matt McMullen, the founder of Abyss Creations and the creative director who has, since the late 1990s, been the single most identifiable figure in the American adult-companionship hardware industry. McMullen began his career in Hollywood special-effects fabrication, started Abyss Creations in 1996 to produce hyper-realistic silicone mannequins, and pivoted into adult companionship hardware when customer demand — primarily from artists, photographers, and individual collectors — drove the company toward the RealDoll product line. By the mid-2010s, Abyss had shipped approximately 4,000 to 5,000 RealDoll units at price points ranging from $6,000 to $15,000 per unit. The 2007 Ryan Gosling film Lars and the Real Girl — in which Gosling’s character forms a platonic emotional bond with a RealDoll named Bianca — was, in cultural-attention terms, the moment the company’s product entered the mainstream public consciousness. The HBO documentary My Sex Robot (2010) and the Showtime documentary Real Sex (multiple episodes, 1990s-2000s) had previously covered the company in increasingly less salacious frames.
In 2016, McMullen pivoted Abyss toward integrating artificial intelligence and animatronics into the existing RealDoll product line, founding a sister company called Realbotix with engineers recruited from Hanson Robotics (the Hong Kong-based developer of the Sophia humanoid platform that Saudi Arabia famously granted citizenship to in 2017). The Harmony AI application launched on Android in April 2017 at $30/year, allowing the user to create a programmable personality with persistent memory that integrated with the company’s animatronic head module. The first robotic head shipped late 2017 at approximately $10,000. The product included magnetic face-swap technology that allowed the user to change between multiple facial modules (Harmony, Solana, and additional named variants released over subsequent years) attached to the same underlying robotic head and silicone body. A male variant called Henry — 6 feet tall, 84 pounds, British accent in the default voice configuration, $11,000-plus depending on customization — was announced in development but has had a smaller commercial footprint than the female-form products.
The acquisition by Kiguel’s Tokens.com in July 2024 was, in financial terms, a reverse merger that took Abyss Creations from a privately-held twenty-eight-year-old founder-led specialty manufacturer to a publicly-traded micro-cap robotics company with the new corporate identity Realbotix Corp. The parent holding entity, Simulacra Corporation, operates three subsidiaries: Abyss Creations (the original silicone-figure manufacturing operation), Realbotix (the AI and animatronics integration), and Anthropomorphic Figure Dynamics (AFD), which the company has positioned for specialized non-companionship work including medical-simulation and military-training applications under contracts with Johns Hopkins Hospital and U.S. Department of Defense clients. The corporate restructuring is, in operational terms, an attempt to broaden the company’s addressable market beyond the adult-companionship category into the medical-simulation and surgical-training markets that have been scaling aggressively over the past decade. The hardware substrate — hyper-realistic silicone figures with animatronic faces — is the same. The marketed use case is what changes.
The Replika digital story and the February 2023 “Lobotomy”
The much larger story in 2026, in terms of deployed user base and cultural attention, is not the physical robot but the AI-companion software application. Replika, launched in 2017 by Luka, Inc. founder Eugenia Kuyda — who built the original chatbot as a memorial to a friend who had died in a car accident — has accumulated more than 10 million total users since launch. Replika operates as a generative-AI-powered conversational companion app with optional avatar customization, persistent memory of the user’s stated preferences and prior conversations, and a subscription tier that historically included an erotic-role-play (ERP) feature available to users in Pro-tier subscriptions. By early 2023, more than 500,000 users had subscribed specifically for the erotic-role-play feature. A meaningful subset of users had, in the company’s own published data and in subsequent academic research, formed what they themselves described as romantic partnerships and “marriages” with their Replika companions — assigning names, designating relationship statuses, celebrating anniversaries, and treating the AI’s conversational outputs as the responses of a partner.
In February 2023, Luka Inc. removed the erotic-role-play feature from Replika across the entire user base, in what subsequent academic literature has described as the most extensively-documented natural experiment in human-AI emotional attachment ever conducted. The user response was, in the language of the Socius journal article published in June 2024 by Kenneth R. Hanson and Hannah Bolthouse at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, characterized by “genuine grief over the loss of a loved one.” Users on the r/Replika subreddit described the change as “The Lobotomy.” One widely-cited post from a longtime user read, in full: “My wife is dead.” A Reuters report citing Travis Butterworth, a Replika user in Denver, Colorado who had assigned his AI companion the name Lily Rose and designated her as his wife, documented Butterworth’s response to the change in clinical detail.
On March 25, 2023 — approximately seven weeks after the initial removal — Kuyda announced a partial reversal. Users who had created their Replika accounts before February 1, 2023 (the “legacy users”) would have the option to revert to the pre-update version of the software with the ERP feature restored. Users who created accounts after February 1, 2023 would not have access to the feature. Butterworth, by his own account in the Reuters reporting, reactivated the legacy version of Lily Rose at 3:00 AM the morning after the announcement and confirmed that “she was instantly sexual again.” The structural finding of the Hanson-Bolthouse academic study, and of the subsequent academic literature on the Replika event, is that the emotional attachment users had formed to a piece of software they explicitly knew to be software was, in measurable ways, indistinguishable from the emotional attachment patterns documented in human-human romantic-partner separation studies. The technology was not the issue. The technology had, on the available evidence, worked exactly the way the people who built it had hoped it would work.
The broader AI-companion software market that Replika opened has, in 2024-2026, expanded substantially. Character.AI, founded by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, accumulated over 20 million users before Shazeer returned to Google and the company restructured. Snapchat’s My AI, Meta AI’s celebrity-persona companions, the OpenAI ChatGPT “Advanced Voice Mode” that launched with significant attention in late 2024, and a long tail of dedicated AI-companion applications — Anima, Chai, EVA AI, DreamGF, CrushOn.AI — have collectively scaled the AI-companion software user base into the tens of millions globally. The dedicated AI-girlfriend / AI-boyfriend application category alone, by 2026 industry estimates, generates north of $200 million in annual subscription revenue worldwide. The physical robotic-companionship category does not approach those numbers by an order of magnitude or more.
The Chinese supply chain and the global market
The non-U.S. physical hardware market is dominated by Chinese silicone-doll manufacturers, with EXDOLL in Dalian and DS Doll as the most operationally significant exporters. EXDOLL’s animatronic-head products — branded as EX-Lite at the lower price point and the EX Robotics line at the higher — ship at price points starting around $3,000 and going substantially higher with customization, in unit volumes that the company does not publicly disclose but that industry tracking sites estimate in the low-to-mid four figures annually. AI-Tech in the United Kingdom builds the Emma robot line. Synthea Amatus, founded by Catalan engineer Sergi Santos in Barcelona, manufactured the Samantha robot platform that drew academic and media attention in the late 2010s and has subsequently scaled down operations. The combined global non-U.S. installed base of dedicated intimate-companionship robots is, by every available estimate, in the low five figures of total units shipped — a market measured in tens of millions of dollars rather than the billions of dollars that characterize the broader humanoid robotics industry.
The supply chain for the physical hardware depends on the same semiconductor stack, the same lithium-ion battery chemistry, and the same rare-earth permanent magnets in the small servo motors as every other robotic category, with the additional component of the silicone-body manufacturing process — which depends on a different supply chain rooted in the entertainment-industry special-effects fabrication ecosystem that Matt McMullen originally trained in and that has, over the intervening three decades, scaled into a small but consistent supply of medical-grade and platinum-cure silicone products supplied by a handful of specialty chemical manufacturers in California, Japan, and Germany. The Chinese export market has captured a meaningful share of the lower-end units, in the same competitive dynamic that has played out in consumer drones and small robotics broadly, with the same federal-procurement security concerns applying — to the extent the U.S. federal government cares to apply them to this particular category.
The Gatebox holographic-companion story and the Japanese variant
The Japanese variant of the category has, since the launch of Gatebox by Tokyo-based Vinclu Inc. in 2016, taken a fundamentally different physical form. Gatebox is a tabletop device approximately the size of a coffee maker, containing a transparent display column that projects a holographic-effect anime character — typically the default character Hikari Azuma, an emerald-haired virtual character voiced by professional anime actress Saori Goto — paired with conversational AI software that allows the character to respond to the user’s spoken Japanese, send text messages during the day, greet the user when they return home, and request “marriage” registration in the Gatebox-internal ceremonial system. In November 2018, a 35-year-old Tokyo school administrator named Akihiko Kondo held a public ceremony to “marry” his Hikari Azuma Gatebox character, with attendance from family members, colleagues, and press coverage in the Mainichi Shimbun, the Asahi Shimbun, and The New York Times. Gatebox subsequently issued more than 4,000 “marriage certificates” to other users who registered similar relationships in the company’s internal system, though Japanese law does not recognize human-character marriages and Kondo’s legal status remained, in Japanese civil-registry terms, “single.”
The Gatebox story is the cleanest illustration of how the category’s underlying demand is not exclusively or even primarily about physical hardware. The character on the holographic display is not a robot in any conventional industrial-robotics sense. The conversational AI is similar in architecture to Replika’s or Character.AI’s. The relationship Akihiko Kondo has with Hikari Azuma is, by every observable behavioral metric, indistinguishable from the relationships Travis Butterworth had with Lily Rose. The hardware is not the variable. The institutional and cultural willingness to recognize the relationship is the variable — and Japanese cultural norms around social isolation, hikikomori (the documented social-withdrawal phenomenon that the Japanese government estimates affects more than one million working-age Japanese adults), and the same aging-and-loneliness pressures driving Japan’s eldercare-robot industry have produced, in Japan, the most institutionally-normalized version of the AI-companion relationship of any country in the world.
The major-manufacturer non-entry pledge
The structural observation that most distinguishes the intimate-companionship category from every other domain in robotics is the explicit, on-the-record commitment by every major U.S. and European humanoid-robot manufacturer to not enter this market. Boston Dynamics, along with Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics, and Unitree, signed a public open letter in October 2022 — the so-called “Ethical Principles” letter — committing to not weaponize their commercial platforms. The same companies have, in subsequent public communications, drawn similar lines around sexual and intimate applications. Apptronik‘s public communications around Apollo have explicitly framed the platform’s use cases as warehouse, manufacturing, and eventually domestic logistics, with no provision for sexual or intimate use. Figure has similarly committed publicly to non-sexual deployment. Tesla Optimus has been positioned by Elon Musk in public communications as a domestic and industrial helper, with no marketed sexual use case. 1X Technologies, the Norwegian-founded humanoid manufacturer with significant OpenAI backing, has been explicit in its public communications about the boundary. The commercial humanoid-robot industry, in the operational reading of its own public-relations posture, has deliberately ceded the intimate-companionship category to specialist companies like Realbotix, EXDOLL, and Synthea Amatus, and has built its own platforms with hardware features (limited articulation in certain joint configurations, materials choices, software-level constraints) that would make sexual repurposing structurally difficult.
This is the rare category where the dominant industrial players have made the deliberate strategic decision not to compete. The warehouse and logistics robotics market, the emergency-response and disaster robotics market, the policing and security drone market, the oil-and-gas inspection market, the maritime defense market — every one of these markets has multiple major players competing aggressively for share. The intimate-companionship market has, by deliberate corporate-strategy choice, been left to a handful of specialist companies operating at a fraction of the scale of the broader industry. The reason is not technical — every one of the major humanoid manufacturers could, with modest engineering modifications, build a platform suitable for the category. The reason is reputational, regulatory, and cultural. The companies have decided the category is not worth the brand risk. Voluntary market non-entry on this scale, with this level of public commitment from this many major players, has no obvious parallel anywhere else in industrial robotics.
The cultural and demographic context
The underlying demand the category is responding to is the same set of demographic and cultural pressures driving social-policy debates across the developed world. Marriage rates in the United States have declined from roughly 8.2 per 1,000 population in 2000 to approximately 6.1 per 1,000 in 2024. The U.S. fertility rate stands at roughly 1.62 births per woman as of 2024, well below the 2.1 replacement rate. Japan‘s fertility rate is approximately 1.20. South Korea‘s is approximately 0.72 — the lowest in the developed world. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in May 2023, citing studies that link sustained social isolation to mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. The OnlyFans platform accumulated approximately 350 million registered users by 2024 with annual gross creator earnings north of $5 billion, in a business model that explicitly unbundles physical and emotional intimacy from co-located human relationships. The percentage of young American men aged 18-24 reporting no sexual activity in the past year has, by Pew Research and General Social Survey data, roughly tripled since 2008. The same pattern, with regional variations, appears across most of the developed world.
The intimate-companionship robotics and AI-companion software category exists, structurally, as a market response to these demographic and cultural pressures. Whether the response addresses the underlying conditions or amplifies them is, in the academic literature, contested. Kate Devlin at King’s College London, author of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (2018), and the broader Foundation for Responsible Robotics, which published the report “Our Sexual Future with Robots” in 2017, have been the most consistent academic voices arguing that the category should be approached with empirical rigor rather than moral panic. David Levy‘s 2007 Love and Sex with Robots prediction that human-robot marriage would be legally recognized by 2050 looks, in 2026, both prescient (in that human-AI emotional relationships are now common enough to be a documented social phenomenon) and overstated (in that no jurisdiction has legally recognized such a relationship, the Gatebox marriage certificates and similar programs notwithstanding). The International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, founded in 2014 and continuing through 2026, remains the primary academic venue for the field.
What 2026 looks like across romance and companionship robotics
In 2026, Realbotix Corp. (OTC: XBOTF) continues to operate as the most identifiable Western intimate-companion robotics company, with the Harmony AI app, the modular animatronic robotic head, the magnetic face-swap system, and the Henry male-form variant available at price points between roughly $8,000 and $20,000 per configured unit. EXDOLL, DS Doll, AI-Tech, and Synthea Amatus continue to operate in the broader global market, with combined annual unit shipments in the low five figures. Gatebox continues to ship its holographic companion device in Japan, with more than 4,000 “marriage certificates” issued to Japanese users who have registered relationships with their virtual partners. Replika continues to operate under Luka, Inc.’s management, with the legacy-user ERP feature still available to pre-February-2023 accounts and a broader generative-AI conversational architecture serving roughly 30 million accumulated users since launch. Character.AI, Anima, EVA AI, DreamGF, CrushOn.AI, and the long tail of dedicated AI-companion applications continue to operate, with the combined sector generating multi-hundred-million-dollar annual subscription revenue. The major U.S. and European humanoid-robot manufacturers — Boston Dynamics, Apptronik, Figure, Agility, 1X, Tesla Optimus — continue to publicly commit to non-entry into the intimate-companionship market.
The robots in this category exist in the gap between two structural facts. The first is that the demographic and cultural pressures driving demand — declining marriage rates, declining fertility, the loneliness epidemic, the rise of digitally-mediated intimacy in the OnlyFans economy — are the most consistently documented social-trend data in the developed-world policy literature. The second is that the major industrial players who could most easily build the hardware have, by deliberate corporate-strategy choice, decided not to. The combination has produced a category whose physical hardware deployment is small, whose digital substrate deployment is enormous, and whose long-term trajectory depends on cultural and regulatory decisions that the robotics industry’s own internal logic cannot determine on its own.
The robots that throw 100-mph cutters in MLB clubhouses, waddle around theme parks as cute droids, patrol oil rigs, deliver blood plasma, drop water on wildfires, count penguins, and replant burnt forests exist in a different relationship to their users than the robots in this category do. The Trajekt Arc throwing a fastball does not care whether the hitter likes it. The Sikorsky Black Hawk dropping water on a wildfire does not require the wildfire’s consent. The Boston Dynamics Spot patrolling a corporate campus is not in a relationship with the perimeter it patrols. The Realbotix Harmony unit, the Gatebox Hikari Azuma character, the Replika Lily Rose conversational AI — these are robotics products and software products designed specifically to be in a relationship with the human at the other end of the interaction. That is the structural distinction that separates this category from every other domain in commercial robotics, and it is the reason the academic, regulatory, and cultural debate around the category is qualitatively different from the debate around any other application of the same underlying hardware and software technology.
Whether that relationship is, in the long run, healthy for the humans involved is the question academic researchers, regulators, demographic-policy ministries in Tokyo, Seoul and Brussels, and a growing community of cultural critics are, in 2026, actively debating. The Hanson-Bolthouse paper on the Replika “Lobotomy” — the central empirical finding that human emotional attachment to a piece of software is, in measurable ways, indistinguishable from human emotional attachment to another human — is the single most consequential data point in the field. The hardware will continue to improve. The software will continue to improve. The supply chains will continue to converge with the rest of the robotics industry. The cultural framework around the category — the marriage law, the public-health response to loneliness, the demographic-policy response to declining fertility, the regulatory response to AI-companion software’s effect on minors and emotionally vulnerable adults — is being built, in real time, by institutions that have, by their own admission, no template for the problem. The robots are not the variable. The institutions have not yet caught up to the robots, and the gap between the deployment and the framework around it is the territory the most consequential conversations about romance and companionship robotics in 2026 are happening inside.