Physical Intelligence—a company bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world—revealed that it has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, according to CNBC. The company is comprised of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms for powering the robots of today and the physically actuated devices of the future.
This round’s investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital, and Lux Capital. Bond Capital also invested in this round. Some of the company’s existing investors include Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
Physical Intelligence emerged from stealth mode in March 2024, and some of the members involved with the company’s founding include Adnan Esmail, Chelsea Finn, Lachy Groom, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Sergey Levine, and Quan Vuong.
Over the last few months, the company developed a general-purpose robot foundation model called π0 (pi-zero). The company believes this is the first step toward developing artificial physical intelligence. It allows users to ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants. Like LLMs, the company’s model is trained with broad and diverse data, and it can follow various text instructions.
But unlike LLMs, it spans images, text, and actions and acquires physical intelligence by training on embodied experience from robots, learning to output low-level motor commands directly through a novel architecture. It can also control a variety of different robots and can either be prompted to carry out the desired task or fine-tuned to specialize it to challenging application scenarios.
