The humanoid robot Pepper: discontinued, revived, and who still uses it

The humanoid robot Pepper stopped being built in 2020. On February 2, 2026 SoftBank put a new one on the market. Both of those are true, and the distance between them is the story.

The short version: about 27,000 units were built, the European company that designed the robot went into receivership on June 2, 2025 and was bought out of it by a Shenzhen security firm, and the Japanese half relaunched it as Pepper+, rental only, from 79,800 yen a month. One thing never changed. A Pepper that is not paying a monthly bill cannot hold a conversation.

The ledger

Date	What happened
Jun 5, 2014	SoftBank introduces Pepper in Tokyo
Jun 20, 2015	Consumer sales open: 198,000 yen plus 14,800 yen a month for 36 months
2020	Foxconn line stopped as unsold units mounted; about 27,000 built
2022	United Robotics Group buys SoftBank Robotics Europe, renamed Aldebaran
Dec 26, 2023	Pepper for Home moves from sales to rental
Feb 28, 2025	SoftBank's cloud migration deadline: unmigrated units need replacing
Jun 2, 2025	A Paris judicial panel puts Aldebaran in receivership
Jul 10, 2025	Maxvision acquires Aldebaran's core assets, NAO and Pepper IP included
Feb 2, 2026	Pepper+ launches alongside a Guinness certification
May 6, 2026	Pepper PARLOR in Shibuya closes

What actually got discontinued

Reuters got the numbers in July 2021 from internal documents and two people familiar with the matter, and it is still the clearest account published. Production at a Foxconn factory in China "was stopped last year as the number of unsold units mounted and the line has since been shut down." SoftBank's public line dated the pause to June 2021; the documents Reuters saw put the factory stop a year earlier. Roughly 27,000 units were produced in total. SoftBank had fewer than 2,000 left. Sales had slumped to under 100 units in some months, and the company was cutting half its Paris workforce.

Then the quote that ages best in this piece. Kazutaka Hasumi, chief marketing officer of SoftBank Robotics, told Reuters: "We will still be selling Pepper in five years."

Five years later, SoftBank is renting a new model. Technically he was right.

The subscription was always the product

The June 2015 launch release has the whole business model in it. The robot was 198,000 yen before tax. On top came the basic plan at 14,800 yen a month for 36 months, an insurance pack at 9,800 yen a month over the same 36 months, and a 9,800 yen handling fee. Add those together and three years of Pepper came to roughly 1.09 million yen. Reuters converted the hardware sticker alone as $1,800, and that is the number that circulates. It describes about a fifth of what an owner paid.

SoftBank's own page for owners past month 37 explains why the monthly line is not optional, in language no marketing department would choose today: "Pepper 本体だけでは、空っぽのパソコンのように何もアプリケーションが入っていません." The robot on its own has no applications in it, like an empty computer. Without the plan, now 10,780 yen a month including tax, the conversation function, the basic apps and robot app downloads "cannot be used." What is left is a chassis you can program in Choregraphe.

That is the same trade the $249 ElliQ makes today at $39 to $59 a month, and the same one that killed most of the consumer robot graveyard. Pepper got there first, and at a far higher price.

February 28, 2025: the deadline nobody outside Japan noticed

The cleanest proof of what a cloud robot is came from SoftBank. A support notice posted December 20, 2024 told business customers that Pepper's core cloud system was moving to a new one and that every unit had to be switched over by February 28, 2025.

The consequence, in SoftBank's words: "新システム切替対応せず期限を過ぎますと、Pepperがご利用できなくなり機体交換が必要になります." Miss the deadline and Pepper becomes unusable, and a unit replacement becomes necessary. Not a repair. A different robot.

It applied across Pepper for Promotion, Biz, Care, Education and the social contribution program. No public count exists of how many units missed the date, which is its own answer.

The European half went bankrupt

Aldebaran was founded in Paris in 2005 by Bruno Maisonnier, bought by SoftBank in 2012 for about $100 million, folded into SoftBank Robotics in 2016, and sold to Germany's United Robotics Group in 2022. URG stopped funding it in 2024 against an operating loss of roughly $29 million. It filed for bankruptcy in mid-February 2025, and a judicial panel put it in receivership on June 2, 2025. It had sold about 20,000 NAO robots and 17,000 Peppers into 70 countries.

On July 10, 2025, Maxvision Technology Corp of Shenzhen, whose usual line of work is biometric authentication and video identification for border security, bought the core assets, including the intellectual property behind NAO and Pepper. Maxvision says it will keep a French subsidiary for R&D and support and retain the existing teams; Heise reported on July 22, 2025 that no redundancies were planned and manufacturing would move to China.

You can watch the handover in a browser. On August 7, 2026, aldebaran.com/en/pepper returns a 301 redirect to maxtronics.com, where the Pepper page is a support article on adding a second language to a robot running NAOqi 2.5, last updated December 20, 2024. NAO is the more consequential half of that deal for schools and labs, covered in the education and research buying guide.

The revival: Pepper+

SoftBank Robotics in Japan, which never went anywhere, launched Pepper+ on February 2, 2026 and marked the day with a Guinness World Records certification for Pepper as the first mass-produced humanoid service robot. The new machine keeps the familiar wheeled torso and adds an AI agent and a redesigned chest tablet. GIGAZINE's writeup the next day lists what it is aimed at: reading a shopper's clothing and suggesting products, face-recognition access control for offices, games, music, AI-generated posters.

There is no purchase price, because there is no purchase. SoftBank's product page lists an AI customer-service plan at 79,800 yen a month on a one-year minimum with a 9,800 yen setup fee, a single-month plan at 150,000 yen, and a care-facility plan from 39,800 yen a month with a 120,000 yen setup fee. Deployment takes three to four weeks. Japan only.

Who still uses one

Three groups, and they look nothing alike.

Japanese businesses and care homes. SoftBank's support site still runs live product lines for Pepper+, Pepper for Home, Pepper for Care and Pepper for Education on August 7, 2026, with the usual attrition: a March 27, 2026 notice ends the RoboPitch PRO app for education customers. The showroom did not survive. Pepper PARLOR at Tokyu Plaza Shibuya, open since December 5, 2019 and drawing over 10,000 visitors a month, closed on May 6, 2026, three months after SoftBank's Pepper+ release name-checked it. Robotstart reported the closure was down to contract matters, with a new location under consideration.

Researchers and clinicians. This is where the install base earns its keep. A February 12, 2026 piece from the University of Victoria on the work of health information science professors Andre Kushniruk and Elizabeth Borycki lists Pepper in cochlear-implant rehabilitation for children in Toulouse, pre-surgery anxiety reduction at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, and a coaching trial with diabetic adolescents in Australia. Pepper has been the default platform for human-robot interaction studies for a decade, and published protocols do not evaporate because a factory closed.

North American buyers, at a price. RobotLAB in Dallas has been the exclusive channel for Pepper and NAO in North America since June 2021, and on August 7, 2026 it still lists the Pepper robot at $32,000, or $1,495 a month, including the charger and two batteries. RobotLAB also claims a 7 to 10 year service life with quarterly preventive maintenance, and says most 2014 to 2016 units still run on refreshed batteries and joint motors. That is a vendor claim about a vendor's own service plan, and the only public statement I can find on how long these last.

And possibly a fourth group. On August 4, 2026, a founder who describes her team as Stanford and ex-SoftBank Robotics people said they have upgraded Pepper's hardware and AI and are running the result commercially in senior living.

A founder says her team has upgraded Pepper on both hardware and AI and deployed it in senior living residences, calling them "paid deployments with real paying customers, not pilots." (@brendahnjiru, 2026-08-04)

Log it as a claim, not a finding: no facility is named, no unit count is given, and I have not seen a contract. What makes it worth logging anyway is the caveat she volunteers rather than the boast. Her limit on a refurbished Pepper is its onboard compute, which is the half of the machine no monthly plan has ever been able to upgrade.

What to take from it

Pepper is the largest-scale test the consumer humanoid idea has had, roughly 27,000 machines with SoftBank's balance sheet behind them, and it still cost about a million yen over three years to keep one talking. The company survived. The product line survived. The hardware in the field survived only where somebody kept paying, and on February 28, 2025 the ones that did not were told to expect a replacement.

Every preorder page for a home humanoid asks you to accept a version of the same arrangement. What is orderable and on what terms: humanoid robots you can actually buy in 2026. Who is still standing: the humanoid robot companies mapped.

If you find a Pepper on a resale site, settle one question before you bid: which cloud it is registered to, and whether that registration transfers. I have found no documented case of a private buyer getting a secondhand Pepper fully talking again. If you have done it, tell me how and I will print it.