We founded Skild AI in 2023 with the goal to build intelligence that is grounded in the physical world. In just a short period, we’ve assembled a stellar team, and achieved significant breakthroughs towards building a scalable AI foundation model for robotics. Today, we’re excited to officially take Skild AI out of stealth, and announce that we’ve raised $300 million in Series A funding, which values our company at $1.5 billion. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), with participation from Felicis Ventures, Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, CRV, SV Angel, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund & the Alexa Fund.

We’re proud to have the backing and support of this esteemed group of investors. Our Series A capital will be used to continue scaling our model, as well as investing in building our team.

Our foundation model is trained on an unparalleled scale of data, representing a breakthrough in the robotics data barrier. As opposed to vertically designed robots that are built for specific applications or only deployed in isolated or constrained environments, our model serves as a general-purpose brain. It has demonstrated unparalleled generalization and emergent capabilities across a diverse embodiment of robots, scenarios and tasks, including manipulation, locomotion and navigation.

From resilient quadrupeds mastering adverse physical conditions, to vision-based humanoids performing dexterous manipulation of objects for complex household and industrial tasks, our model will enable the use of low-cost robots across a broad range of industries and applications.

This is especially important given the current and projected labor shortage in America. There are more than 1.7 million jobs available than there are unemployed workers. Industries such as healthcare, construction, warehousing and manufacturing are among the most impacted - experts project there will be 2.1 million unfulfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030. Additionally, many of these jobs can be dangerous for humans, such as oil rigs and machine rooms. With our model, any kind of robot can be agile, dexterous, and safe to interact with people - providing significant potential for automation within real-world environments. We believe this presents an opportunity to change the entire physical economy.

"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

"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. This has the potential to disrupt the whole physical economy, bringing robots to hazardous jobs and to sectors suffering huge labor shortages." - Sri Viswanath, General Partner at Coatue and former CTO of Atlassian

"At Felicis. we’ve invested in robotics companies for over 15 years. Skild is the most visionary robotics company we’ve seen, pushing the frontiers of physically-grounded intelligence forward. The model they’re building will execute any task, in any environment, on any hardware. This is one of the most ambitious visions we’ve encountered from an early-stage startup - the global workforce seems poised to be fundamentally reshaped by Skild." - Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner of Felicis Ventures

"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 is advancing the state of the art in AI and robotics – applying its techniques to an array of commercial, industrial, and consumer use cases that stand to benefit from greater autonomy. The Industrial Innovation Fund and Alexa Fund are excited to invest in such an impressive team on behalf of Amazon, and excited by the potential of such technologies to unlock value for our customers." - Franziska Bossart, Head of the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund

Our 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. Our team includes some of the top robotics and AI experts from Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and the top schools including Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UIUC. We’re looking for passionate and talented people to join our team, and we’re hiring for roles across AI, robotics, engineering, operations, and security. If you’re interested, we’d love to talk - please apply here.

Thank you to our team members for all their hard work so far, and to our investors for believing in our mission. We look forward to sharing more with you all soon.