Skild AI Raises $300 Million to Build ‘General-Purpose Brain’ for Robots

Skild AI has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round to build an artificial intelligence (AI) model for robotics.

The company will use the new capital to expand its team and to continue scaling its model and training datasets in preparation for future commercial deployment of its technology, Skild AI said in a Tuesday (July 9) press release.

“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, said in the release.

Skild’s model is being designed as a “shared, general-purpose brain” for a variety of robots, scenarios and tasks, according to the release. Unlike those designed for specific applications, it aims to enable the use of low-cost robots for a broad range of industries and applications.

The company’s latest funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group and Jeff Bezos, via Bezos Expeditions, per the release.

“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,” Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said in the release.

Sri Viswanath, general partner at Coatue, said in the release: “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.”

New advancements in AI are allowing companies to develop robots with better features and more effective human interaction capabilities, PYMNTS reported in February.

On July 3, Sanctuary AI raised an unspecified amount of new funding that brought the total investment in the company to more than $140 million as it works to create “humanlike intelligence in general purpose robots.”

In March, a new company called Physical Intelligence announced its launch, saying it aims to develop AI to power “the robots of today and the physically actuated devices of the future.”