Generalist, a company focused on building foundation models for robotics and physical-world intelligence, announced a new $400 million funding round to accelerate its mission of developing what it describes as “physical AGI,” bringing its total funding to more than $500 million.
The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and included participation from 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Norwest, and existing investors such as NVIDIA, Boldstart Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and NFDG. New angel investors include Fei-Fei Li, Naval Ravikant, and Bin Lin.
Generalist is building AI systems designed to understand and act in the physical world, a rapidly emerging category often referred to as “physical AI.” Unlike language models that primarily interact through text, physical AI systems are intended to power robots capable of perceiving, reasoning, and operating in real-world environments across industries such as manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, healthcare, hospitality, and space exploration.
The company believes the world is entering a new era in which billions of robots will eventually operate across a wide range of environments, all requiring intelligence that can navigate and interact with the physical world. Generalist’s goal is to develop the foundational AI models and learning systems necessary to enable that transition.
The new capital will be used to expand Generalist’s next-generation AI models, scale its physical data engine, increase compute and training infrastructure, and deepen partnerships with industries expected to deploy robotic systems at scale. The company said it is focused on building whatever technologies are necessary to make physical AGI a reality rather than adhering to any single methodology or research approach.
The announcement comes amid growing investor interest in physical AI and robotics. Advances in robot learning, simulation, foundation models, and autonomous systems have fueled increasing investment in technologies designed to bring AI into the physical world.
Generalist was founded by Pete Florence, Andy Zeng, and Andrew Barry. The company is focused on developing embodied foundation models that can serve as a general-purpose intelligence layer for robots operating across a wide variety of tasks and environments.
