Genesis AI, a physical AI research lab and full-stack robotics company, emerged from stealth with a goal of unlocking unlimited physical labor. And the company is building a universal robotics foundation model (RFM) and a horizontal robotics platform, raising $105 million co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Bpifrance, HSG, and visionary leaders Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel.
Physical labor is a significant component of the Global GDP, but most of it remains unautomated due to the limitations of current automation solutions. Contemporary robotic systems, such as industrial arms, depend on brittle, rigid, and overfitted software stacks. These systems are limited in scope, expensive to deploy, and challenging to scale. Genesis looks to transform the next generation of general-purpose robots by providing unprecedented robustness, flexibility, and cost efficiency – ultimately aiming to automate all physical labor.
Genesis employs a data-centric and full-stack approach to physical AI, developing a scalable and universal data engine that integrates high-fidelity physics simulation, multimodal generative modeling, and large-scale real robot data collection. Its in-house developed simulation stack will produce rich synthetic data at scale, along with a more efficient and scalable real-world data collection system. This dual engine of synthetic and real data bridges historically separate domains to amass the largest, most diverse, and highest-quality data to train RFMs.
Launched by academic and industry technical experts from Mistral AI, Nvidia, Google, CMU, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, and UMD, with extensive expertise across physics simulation, graphics, robotics, and large-scale AI model training and deployment, Genesis is well-positioned to swiftly realize its vision through a unique approach to physical AI. The company also plans to open-source components of its data engine and foundation model, empowering developers, researchers, and partners to build on its innovations and accelerate advancements across the broader field of physical AI.
KEY QUOTES:
“General-purpose robots powered by physical AI will define the next major chapter of human history. While digital AI has made extraordinary progress, physical AI – the intelligence that allows machines to perceive, understand, and interact with the real world – has lagged behind. We’re here to change that. By building on the foundations laid by existing digital AI models, we’re bringing human-level intelligence into the physical world. Genesis’s unique approach by fueling digital AI knowledge to drive the emergence of physical AI will deliver unmatched capability, scalability, and cost-efficiency to unlock unlimited physical labor. With 75% of global companies struggling to fill jobs, physical AI is more essential than ever.”
Zhou Xian, CEO of Genesis
“Even in the most ‘automated’ industries today, the robot-to-human ratio rarely exceeds 1:30, due to the long tail of tasks requiring dexterity, cognition, mobility, and real-world reasoning that current robots simply can’t handle. General-purpose robotics is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for and stands to impact trillions in labor value across sectors. Genesis has the vision, strategy, and world-class team to define the era of physical AI in order to unlock unlimited physical labor through general-purpose robotics.”
Eclipse Partner Charly Mwangi
“Physical AI has yet to scale like LLMs because collecting and aligning real-world data can be operationally complex. Genesis is taking a full-stack approach by integrating best-in-class simulation data with real-world robotics data in a continuous, closed-loop system. Owning the entire data pipeline in-house gives them a unique data advantage. We’re excited to back Genesis early as they work to build a universal foundation model for robotics.”
Kanu Gulati of Khosla Ventures
