Robotics startup Skild AI has secured a massive $1.4 billion funding round, propelling its valuation past $14 billion.
Skild AI
Robotics startup building general-purpose AI models to control any robot and perform any task in any environment.
- Founded
- 2023
- Location
- Pittsburgh, United States
- Valuation
- $1.5B
The round, led by SoftBank Group and featuring participation from NVIDIA Ventures and Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions, signals serious investor confidence in the company's ambitious vision for a universal robotics brain.
The Omni-Bodied Brain Ambition
Skild AI is developing what it calls the "Skild Brain," a general foundation model designed to operate any robot, regardless of its physical form. This contrasts sharply with current robotics, where models are often tailored to specific hardware.
The company claims the Skild Brain can handle tasks from making eggs to navigating difficult terrain, adapting in real time to physical changes like losing a limb or encountering new environments without retraining. This adaptability, achieved through what Skild AI calls In-Context Learning from human videos and simulations, is a key differentiator in a field lacking the vast, internet-scale data available to language models.
The capital will fuel scaling this model for enterprise deployment, with consumer applications as a longer-term goal.