Pittsburgh startup Skild.ai just secured $300 million in Series A funding, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion. The company, founded in 2023 by ex-Carnegie Mellon professors Abhinav Gupta and Deepak Pathak, is developing what it calls a "general purpose brain" for robots.
Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos led the round, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Sequoia, and others.
Skild.ai is taking a different approach from most other robotics companies. Instead of building specialized AIs for specific tasks, they've created a versatile AI model that can be plugged into various robots. This could make advanced robotics more accessible across industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and construction.
"Our model has shown it can generalize across different robots, scenarios, and tasks," said Pathak. The company claims its training data is 1000 times larger than competitors', thanks to innovative collection methods including human-operated robots and learning from public videos.
The U.S. faces a growing labor shortage, with projections of 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030. Skild.ai's technology could help automate dangerous or labor-intensive tasks.
Investors are excited about the potential. "Skild AI could redefine what machines are capable of," said Raviraj Jain of Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The company faces stiff competition from both tech giants and well-funded startups. OpenAI recently revived its robotics team, while companies like Figure AI and Covariant are also vying for dominance in the AI-powered robotics space.