Skild AI, an innovative AI robotics startup, has successfully raised $300 million in a Series A funding round. Leading the investment were Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions. Additional investors included Felicis Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, CRV, Amazon, SV Angel, and Carnegie Mellon University.
The newly acquired capital will be utilized to scale Skild AI’s business model and expand its training datasets for future commercial applications. Additionally, the funds will aid in the hiring of new talent across AI, robotics, engineering, operations, and security teams. Deepak Pathak, Co-founder of Skild AI, shared on X that over the past year, he and Abhinav Gupta have worked with their top-tier team to build an AI foundation model grounded in the physical world.
Founded in 2023 by former Carnegie Mellon University professors Abhinav Gupta and Deepak Pathak, Skild AI focuses on developing AI-powered brains for robots. With this funding, the Pittsburgh-based startup’s valuation has reached $1.5 billion. Skild AI asserts that its model is trained on significantly more data points than its competitors—at least 1,000 times more. Unlike robots designed for specific tasks, Skild AI’s model is a versatile AI applicable to various robots and scenarios, including locomotion and navigation tasks.
Raviraj Jain, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, commented that Skild AI has made significant breakthroughs in a short time and is a unique company capable of redefining the understanding of machine capabilities. Jain also emphasized that the company’s innovation in applying foundational AI principles to real-world scenarios is setting the industry on a path toward general-purpose robotics.
The model is expected to enable low-cost robots to operate across various industries, handling challenging conditions and performing complex tasks in homes and factories. Stephanie Zhan, Partner at Sequoia Capital, believes a GPT-3 moment is approaching in the world of robotics, triggering a monumental shift that brings advancements in digital intelligence to the physical world. The Skild AI team comprises experts in robotics and AI, including individuals with experience at Meta, Tesla, NVIDIA, Amazon, and Google, as well as academic institutions like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.
