Skild AI, an AI-based company company building a scalable foundation model for robotics, today announced it has closed a $300 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos (via 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 $1.5 billion.
Skild AI is developing intelligence that is grounded in the physical world. And the company is breaking the data barrier in robotics, training its model on at least 1,000 times more data points than competing models. Unlike vertically designed robots that are built for specific applications, Skild’s model serves as a shared and general-purpose brain for a diverse embodiment of robots, scenarios, and tasks, including manipulation, locomotion, and navigation.
There are many examples of potential use cases for the company’s technology: From resilient quadrupeds mastering adverse physical conditions to vision-based humanoids performing dexterous manipulation of objects for complex household and industrial tasks, the company’s model will enable the use of low-cost robots across a wide range of industries and applications.
Skild’s general-purpose AI model makes any kind of robot agile, dexterous, and safe to interact with people. This is important since there is a massive labor shortage worldwide. Industries like healthcare, construction, warehousing and manufacturing are among the most impacted.
Skild AI CEO and co-founder Deepak Pathak and President and co-founder Abhinav Gupta have been Carnegie Mellon University professors with a combined 25 years of experience between them in robotics and AI, and they have been credited for numerous industry breakthroughs like self-supervised robotics, curiosity-driven agents, and adaptive robot learning. Together, they have a 150+ h-index, over 90k citations, and received multiple awards for their work. And the Skild AI team includes robotics and AI experts from Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and the top schools, including Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.
The funding will be used to continue scaling the company’s model and training datasets for future commercial deployment of its technology, in addition to hiring for roles across AI, robotics, engineering, operations, and security.
Skild AI’s 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.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. We believe Skild AI represents a step change in how robotics will be scaled, and has the potential to change the entire physical economy.”
– Deepak Pathak, CEO and Co-Founder of Skild AI
“With general purpose robots that can safely perform any automated task, in any environment, and with any type of embodiment, we can expand the capabilities of robots, democratize their cost, and support the severely understaffed labor market.”
– Abhinav Gupta, President and Co-Founder of Skild AI
“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. 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.”
– Raviraj Jain, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
“A GPT-3 moment is coming to the world of robotics. It will spark a monumental shift that brings advancements similar to what we’ve seen in the world of digital intelligence, to the physical world. Since partnering with Skild AI at the seed round, I have deep conviction that they are the team to pursue one of the most ambitious visions of our era.”
– Stephanie Zhan, Partner, Sequoia Capital
“Skild AI has a truly scalable approach to building foundational models for robot manipulation and locomotion. Coatue is thrilled to back their effort to revolutionize robotics, shifting from pre-programmed to dynamic, adaptable robots. With Skild’s technology, there is potential to disrupt today’s physical economy, bringing robots to hazardous jobs such as in machine rooms, containments, etc., and to sectors suffering huge labor shortages such as in security and hospitals.”
– Sri Viswanath, General Partner at Coatue and former CTO of Atlassian
