Pittsburgh, PA-based Skild AI, an AI robotics company has raised $300M in Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), with participation from Felicis Ventures, Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, CRV, Amazon, SV Angel, and Carnegie Mellon University. The funding brings the company to a valuation of $1.5B.
The funding will be used to hire people for positions in AI, robotics, engineering, operations, and security, as well as to keep growing the company’s model and training datasets for potential commercial technology deployment.
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“The large-scale model we are building demonstrates unparalleled generalization and emergent capabilities across robots and tasks, providing significant potential for automation within real-world environments,” said Deepak Pathak, CEO and Co-Founder of Skild AI. “We believe Skild AI represents a step change in how robotics will be scaled, and has the potential to change the entire physical economy.”
Skild AI foundation model is trained on an unparalleled scale of data, representing a breakthrough in the robotics data barrier. As opposed to vertically designed robots that are built for specific applications or only deployed in isolated or constrained environments, Skild AI model serves as a general-purpose brain. It has demonstrated unparalleled generalization and emergent capabilities across a diverse embodiment of robots, scenarios and tasks, including manipulation, locomotion and navigation.
“Skild AI has achieved massive breakthroughs in a short period, and we believe they’re a one-of-a-kind company that could redefine our notions of what machines are capable of,” said Raviraj Jain, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Deepak and Abhinav have been catalysts of advancements in robotics, and their innovation around leveraging the core principles of foundation models into the real world puts the industry on the path of general purpose robotics.”
About Skild AI
Founded in 2023, Skild AI long-term goal is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) rooted in the physical world, challenging the popular notion that AGI can solely arise from digital knowledge. Skild AI team includes some of the top robotics and AI experts from Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and the top schools including Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UIUC.
