Physical Intelligence Secures $400 Million for Revolutionary Robot Software Development

AI Startup Lands $400 Million to Make Robots Handle Objects More Like Humans | PYMNTS.com

With a fresh infusion of $400 million from Jeff Bezos and other investors, startup Physical Intelligence aims to give robots a human's delicate touch, promising to reshape how businesses handle objects in warehouses and stores. The technology addresses a barrier that has long prevented widespread retail, logistics and manufacturing automation: robots' inability to handle diverse objects and adapt to new environments reliably. The development comes as businesses face mounting pressure to streamline operations amid labor shortages and rising costs. "Industries beyond warehousing and retail, such as healthcare, agriculture, and hospitality, may see considerable impacts," Kaveh Vahdat, founder and CEO of RiseAngle, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered game creation company, told PYMNTS. "In healthcare, for example, robots could take on logistical tasks, patient support and sanitation, potentially leading to more streamlined services but also reducing the need for specific support roles. Agriculture could leverage robotic systems for labor-intensive tasks like planting and harvesting, but this could also reduce demand for seasonal and manual labor. In hospitality, robots handling room service, cleaning and deliveries might limit front-line roles while allowing staff to focus on customer-facing tasks." There's growing interest in AI to power robots. OpenAI recently hired Caitlin "CK" Kalinowski, Meta's former head of augmented reality glasses, to lead its robotics and consumer hardware initiatives. The move signals OpenAI's growing focus on bringing AI into the physical world, alongside its investment in robotics startup Physical Intelligence. Spider-like AI robots from Israeli firm Verbotics made their U.S. debut in Dallas. They used cameras and sensors to clean high-rise windows while eliminating human risk. Smarter Bots Physical Intelligence reportedly is implementing new control software designed to make robots more adaptable and capable of handling complex tasks autonomously. The software aims to change how robots operate in unpredictable environments. The funding round, led by Jeff Bezos, Lux Capital and Thrive Capital, values the company at $2 billion, reflecting confidence in its potential to advance robotics and automation technology. The new pi-zero software leverages advanced machine learning algorithms, enabling robots to perform diverse tasks such as folding laundry, bagging groceries and extracting toast from a toaster. By integrating data from multiple robots, pi-zero allows for real-time adjustments and efficient task execution, making robots more capable of handling highly specialized tasks with improved efficiency. Robot Boom AI-controlled robots have gained a foothold in commercial sectors, taking on operations from warehouses to store aisles. As businesses face mounting pressure to streamline logistics and reduce costs, intelligent robots increasingly take on complex tasks traditionally performed by humans -- with precision and efficiency. At the heart of this surge is Amazon, which has expanded its robotic capabilities across its sprawling network of fulfillment centers. Amazon introduced the Sparrow robot, which can select and organize products of various shapes and sizes with AI-enhanced dexterity. The company says Sparrow has helped reduce labor-intensive sorting times, enhancing the fulfillment speed for millions of packages daily. The move is part of Amazon's broader initiative to automate repetitive tasks, allowing its human workforce to focus on higher-order customer service roles. Walmart is leveraging AI-powered floor scrubbers with cameras to monitor inventory across Sam's Club stores, capturing 20 million shelf photos daily. This system alerts stockrooms automatically and has improved employee productivity by 15% since deployment. Robots are also reshaping customer interactions. In Japan, SoftBank's "Pepper" robot, equipped with conversational AI, has seen a recent upgrade and deployment in retail settings to assist customers with navigation and product information. The proliferation of AI-controlled robots raises questions about the future of employment in sectors that rely heavily on manual labor. While executives at these companies argue that robots are meant to augment human workers rather than replace them, labor advocates are wary of the implications for low-skill jobs as machines take on an ever-increasing share of tasks.

Robotics Startup Physical Intelligence Raises $400 Million, Backed by Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, and Major Investors

Physical Intelligence, a robotics artificial intelligence start-up, announced that it has raised $400 million in a funding round led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon's executive chairman. This investment, which also saw participation from Thrive Capital, Lux Capital, OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures, and Bond, has brought the company's valuation to approximately $2 billion. Founded this year, Physical Intelligence's mission is to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world. The company has developed a general-purpose robotic foundation model, π0 (pi-zero), as a first step toward its long-term goal of developing artificial physical intelligence. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Karol Hausman, a former Google robotics scientist. Other co-founders include Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lachy Groom, an investor and ex-executive at Stripe. The company sees a future where users can easily direct robots to perform various tasks -- similar to how people currently interact with large language models and chatbot assistants. "Like LLMs, our model is trained on broad and diverse data and can follow various text instructions. Unlike LLMs, it spans images, text, and actions and acquires physical intelligence by training on embodied experience from robots, learning to directly output low-level motor commands via a novel architecture," the company said in its blog post. Its recent research has demonstrated the software's capabilities, showcasing robots performing diverse tasks such as folding laundry, clearing tables, and flattening boxes. According to the company's executives, the software's versatility positions it as a "true generalist," setting it apart from more task-specific robotics A.I. software. As competition in the robotics industry heats up, other companies are also pursuing ambitious goals. Skild and Figure AI are developing multi-purpose robotic intelligence systems, while Sanctuary AI is focused on creating humanoids with human-like intelligence. Tesla recently joined the fray, with CEO Elon Musk showcasing Optimus, a humanoid robot which can perform everyday tasks such as dog-walking, lawn-mowing, and household chores, even interacting in Gen Z slang with expressive hand gestures. Amazon, meanwhile, sees robotics as a way to streamline operations and cut delivery times, signaling the growing interest in applying robotics across various industries.

Robot AI startup Physical Intelligence raises $400 million from Bezos, OpenAI

(Reuters) - Physical Intelligence, a startup that is developing foundational software for robots, said on Monday it has raised $400 million in early-stage funding from Amazon's Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. The new funds were raised at a $2 billion valuation, PitchBook data showed. Physical Intelligence is seeking to make a software that would work on any robot, eliminating the need to develop a software for each specific task. The largest tech companies -- Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia -- are investing billions in adopting AI. Funding of AI and cloud companies in the U.S., Europe, and Israel is estimated to hit $79.2 billion by the end of 2024, according to venture capital firm Accel. Multiple startups are foraying into the robotic AI space, including Vicarious, which was acquired by Alphabet-owned Intrinsic in 2022, Universal Robots, Seegrid, and Covariant. Elon Musk earlier said that there will be at least 10 billion humanoid robots priced between $20,000 and $25,000 by 2040. Tesla also showed the latest version of its Optimus humanoid robot at the Robotaxi unveiling event. Last week, Physical Intelligence published a paper which showed how its software, called ?0, or pi-zero, enabled robots to fold laundry, bagging groceries, and taking toasts out of a toaster. (Reporting by Rishi Kant in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)

Robot AI startup Physical Intelligence raises $400 mln from Bezos, OpenAI

Nov 4 (Reuters) - Physical Intelligence, a startup that is developing foundational software for robots, said on Monday it has raised $400 million in early-stage funding from Amazon's Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. The new funds were raised at a $2 billion valuation, PitchBook data showed. Physical Intelligence is seeking to make a software that would work on any robot, eliminating the need to develop a software for each specific task. The largest tech companies -- Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia -- are investing billions in adopting AI. Funding of AI and cloud companies in the U.S., Europe, and Israel is estimated to hit $79.2 billion by the end of 2024, according to venture capital firm Accel. Multiple startups are foraying into the robotic AI space, including Vicarious, which was acquired by Alphabet-owned Intrinsic in 2022, Universal Robots, Seegrid, and Covariant. Elon Musk earlier said that there will be at least 10 billion humanoid robots priced between $20,000 and $25,000 by 2040. Tesla also showed the latest version of its Optimus humanoid robot at the Robotaxi unveiling event. Last week, Physical Intelligence published a paper, opens new tab which showed how its software, called π0, or pi-zero, enabled robots to fold laundry, bagging groceries, and taking toasts out of a toaster. Reporting by Rishi Kant in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Physical Intelligence Raises $400 Million to Develop Robot Software | PYMNTS.com

Robotics startup Physical Intelligence has reportedly raised $400 million in early-stage funding. The funding round, which included participation from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and OpenAI, values the company at $2 billion, Reuters reported Monday (Nov. 4), citing PitchBook data. According to the report, Physical Intelligence aims to develop software that would work on any robot, doing away with the need to build software for individual tasks. The company last week published a paper arguing how its pi-zero software allowed robots to perform tasks like folding laundry and bagging groceries. As Reuters notes, the world's tech giants -- Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia -- have made multi-billion-dollar investments in artificial intelligence (AI). Funding for AI and cloud firms in the U.S., Israel and Europe is projected to reach $79.2 billion by year's end, the report adds, citing data from venture capital firm Accel. Meanwhile, a number of companies are venturing into the robotic AI space, with Elon Musk forecasting that there will be at least 10 billion humanoid robots priced between $20,000 and $25,000 by 2040. His company, Tesla, recently showcased the latest version of its Optimus humanoid robot at the Robotaxi unveiling event at Warner Brothers studio. "And the Hollywood setting matched the Hollywood-style hyperbole of the event, which was light on details and launch timelines while heavy on promises that included self-driving cars, cybervans and cybercabs, as well as fully autonomous bipedal 'Optimus' robots," PYMNTS wrote after the event. Among the concrete details the company shared was a pledge to begin building the fully autonomous Cybercab by 2026 or 2027, and sell it for a price of less than $30,000, as well as the roll-out of a sister-vehicle robovan that can transport up to 20 people. Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote in August about a debate among experts on the future of work and commerce sparked by the potential for humanoid robots in stores and factories. Although companies are exploring humanoid robots for tasks such as assembly and customer service, opinions vary greatly on their adoption rate and implications. Experts say there will be a gradual integration and not a rapid revolution, with key obstacles in technology development, workforce adaptation and customer acceptance still ahead. "As Henry Ford said, 'Why is it that I always get a whole person when all I want is a pair of hands?' This sentiment applies here too," Ding Zhao, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, told PYMNTS.

Robot AI specialist Physical Intelligence raises millions

Physical Intelligence, an artificial intelligence startup seeking to create brains for a wide variety of robots, announced Monday that it had raised $400 million in financing from major investors. The round was led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon's executive chair, and venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors include OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond. The fundraising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments. That's significantly more than the $70 million that the startup, which was founded this year, had raised in seed financing. The company wants to make foundational software that would work for any robot, instead of the traditional approach of creating software for specific machines and specific tasks. "What we're doing is not just a brain for any particular robot," said Karol Hausman, the company's co-founder and CEO. "It's a single generalist brain that can control any robot." It's a tricky task: Building such a model requires a huge amount of data on how to operate in the real world. Those information sets largely do not exist, compelling the company to compile its own. Its work has been aided by big leaps in AI models that can interpret visual data. Among the company's co-founders are Hausman, a former robotics scientist at Google; Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Lachy Groom, an investor and former executive at payments giant Stripe. In a paper published last week, Physical Intelligence showed how its software -- called π0, or pi-zero -- enabled robots to fold laundry, clear a table, flatten a box and more. "It's a true generalist," Hausman said. Physical Intelligence executives said that its software was closer to GPT-1, the first model published for chatbots by OpenAI, than to the more advanced brains that power ChatGPT. Groom said that it was hard to predict the rate of progress: A ChatGPT-style breakthrough "could be far sooner than we expect, or it could definitely be far out." The field of robotics AI is getting crowded, with players including Skild, which is also working on general-purpose robot AI; Figure AI, whose backers include OpenAI and Bezos; and Covariant, which focuses on industrial applications. Amazon has a vested interest in the industry, and has been adding more robots in its operations as it seeks to drive down costs and get orders to customers faster. Tesla also has major AI ambitions, with Elon Musk recently saying that the company's humanoid robot would be "the biggest product ever of any kind."

Laundry-Folding Robots Are Finally Here -- and It's Backed by Jeff Bezos and OpenAI

San Francisco-based Physical Intelligence is working to tackle one of the most difficult tasks of A.I. application. The advent of A.I. has already led to pivotal breakthroughs in the worlds of drug discovery, education and even chess. But incorporating the technology into everyday actions in the physical world remains a challenge. Physical Intelligence, a San Francisco-based startup, is working to solve this issue by creating general-purpose robots that can perform household chores ranging from folding laundry to clearing tables. Launched earlier this year, the startup is already valued at $2 billion after raising $400 million from a roster of investors including Jeff Bezos and OpenAI. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters The fundraising was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by the company in a statement to Observer. The round was led by Bezos and venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other participants included Redpoint Ventures and Bond. Instead of creating specialist robots programmed for a particular duty, Physical Intelligence is focused on building robots that can adapt to the environment for a variety of scenarios. "What we're doing is not just a brain for any particular robot," Karol Hausman, the startup's CEO and co-founder and a former Google DeepMind research scientist, told The New York Times. "It's a single generalist brain that can control any robot." Robots that can fold laundry, bus tables and assemble boxes https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/11/PhysicalIntelligence_2min_v2_out.mp4 Physical Intelligence trains robots on models that combine the text comprehension and diverse data training of large language models (LLMs) with specific task datasets collected from robots. Last month, it unveiled a general-purpose robot foundation model called pi-zero that managed to successfully train robots to unload laundry, bus tables, place food in to-go containers and assemble cardboard boxes. Folding laundry has been traditionally difficult for robots, given the complicated range of motions needed to put away a tangled pile of clothing. "To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity," said the startup in a recent blog post. Physical Intelligence's founding team include renowned engineers and scientists like Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lachy Groom, a former executive at Stripe. In March, the company raised $70 million in a seed round that involved OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital, Outset Capital, Khosla Ventures and Greenoaks. The company is currently hiring for ten roles including research scientists, machine learning engineers and robot operators. It also still has some kinks to work out, as evidenced by the startup pointing out instances when its robots failed at certain tasks like filling a bag with groceries or stacking serving bowls. In its blog post, Physical Intelligence conceded that more work is needed in areas like autonomous self-improvement, robustness and safety. It hopes to improve over time with several collaborations across different companies and robotics labs that will redefine hardware designs and incorporate partner data to adapt models to specific platforms, said the company. Succeeding "will require not only new technologies and more data, but a collective effort involving the entire robotics community."

Physical Intelligence, a Specialist in Robot A.I., Raises $400 Million

Physical Intelligence, an artificial intelligence start-up seeking to create brains for a wide variety of robots, plans to announce on Monday that it had raised $400 million in financing from major investors. The round was led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon's executive chairman, and the venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors include OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond. The fund-raising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments. That's significantly more than the $70 million that the start-up, which was founded this year, had raised in seed financing. The company wants to make foundational software that would work for any robot, instead of the traditional approach of creating software for specific machines and specific tasks. "What we're doing is not just a brain for any particular robot," said Karol Hausman, the company's co-founder and chief executive. "It's a single generalist brain that can control any robot." It's a tricky task: Building such a model requires a huge amount of data on how to operate in the real world. Those information sets largely do not exist, compelling the company to compile its own. Its work has been aided by big leaps in A.I. models that can interpret visual data. Among the company's co-founders are Mr. Hausman, a former robotics scientist at Google; Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Lachy Groom, an investor and former executive at the payments giant Stripe. In a paper published last week, Physical Intelligence showed how its software -- called π0, or pi-zero -- enabled robots to fold laundry, clear a table, flatten a box and more. "It's a true generalist," Mr. Hausman said. Physical Intelligence executives said that its software was closer to GPT-1, the first model published for chatbots by OpenAI, than to the more advanced brains that power ChatGPT. Mr. Groom said that it was hard to predict the rate of progress: A ChatGPT-style breakthrough "could be far sooner than we expect, or it could definitely be far out." The field of robotics A.I. is getting crowded, with players including Skild, which is also working on general-purpose robot A.I.; Figure AI, whose backers include OpenAI and Mr. Bezos; and Covariant, which focuses on industrial applications. Amazon has a vested interest in the industry, and has been adding more robots in its operations as it seeks to drive down costs and get orders to customers faster. Tesla also has major A.I. ambitions, with Elon Musk recently saying that the company's humanoid robot would be "the biggest product ever of any kind."

These Jeff Bezos-Backed Robots Clean Up After Dinner and Fold Your Clothes -- and Just Hit Unicorn Status: Video

Physical Intelligence said that the AI robotics technology is still in its early stages. Last week, AI startup Physical Intelligence unveiled its first general robot model, π₀ (pi-zero), which can do everything from clearing the table after dinner to folding the laundry. Earlier this year, the company was valued at $400 million. Now, a Monday report shows that the startup has reached unicorn status, surpassing a $1 billion valuation after raising $400 million, at a valuation of $2.4 billion, from investors like Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, and Thrive Capital. Physical Intelligence's goal is to bring general-purpose AI into the real world with robotics, according to its website. It only took them eight months to develop the robot model π₀, which the startup says is the "first step" towards a future in which robots process and perform tasks with as much ease as AI chatbots answering prompts. "Our mission at Physical Intelligence is to develop foundation models that can control any robot to perform any task," the startup wrote in a blog post. "Our experiments so far show that such models can control a variety of robots and perform tasks that no prior robot learning system has done successfully." Related: Meet Figure 02, the 'Most Advanced Humanoid Robot on the Market' Backed By Jeff Bezos, OpenAI A video released last week shows a π₀ robot taking clothes out of a dryer, putting them in a basket, placing the basket next to a table, and then taking the clothes out one by one and folding them into a neat stack. Two π₀ robots also work together to load coffee into a coffee grinder: One robot holds the bag of coffee beans open while the other scoops the beans out. The same two robots assemble a cardboard box. Yet another π₀ robot clears up after dinner by picking up delicate wineglasses, utensils, and plates and placing them into a bin. The robot recognizes the difference between what needs to go in the trash, like food scraps, and what needs to be washed, like a plate, and places each into its appropriate container. Though these initial results show the robots "in their infancy," they "paint a promising picture" of the future of AI robotics, according to Physical Intelligence. Other robotics startups in the space include Figure AI, a $2.6 billion company backed by Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, and OpenAI that develops humanoid robots.

AI startup Physical Intelligence raises $400M to create a brain for any robot - SiliconANGLE

AI startup Physical Intelligence raises $400M to create a brain for any robot Physical Intelligence, a startup researching practical artificial intelligence models to create "brains" for robots, announced today it has raised $400 million in new funding. The New York Times broke the news that the round was led by Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon.com Inc., Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors participating in the round included leading AI firm OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond. The funding round valued the company at about $2 billion. It follows a $70 million seed round in March this year led by Thrive Capital. Co-founder and Chief executive Karol Hausman previously worked as a scientist on robotics at Google LLC and is joined by a team of researchers formerly from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. The company seeks to build a universal AI model for robots that can understand the physical world so they can complete complex multipart tasks. "What we're doing is not just a brain for any particular robot," Hausman told the New York Times. "It's a single generalist brain that can control any robot." According to the company, today's robots are specialists, most industrial robots exist to do a single task or a series of simplified motions. These robots can work around small changes in their environments but can't adapt easily to extremely messy or complex spaces such as homes or other real-world places. "AI could change that, allowing robots to learn and follow user instructions, so that programming a new behavior is as simple as telling the robot what you want done, and the robot can itself figure out how to adapt its behavior to its environment," Physical Intelligence said in a blog post last week. The company's answer is an AI model named π0, or pi-zero, a general-purpose robot foundation model that provides a way for users to simply ask a robot to perform a task just like they can talk to a large language model for a chatbot assistant. Unlike an LLM, it needs to span a larger variety of data from text, images, video and "physical intelligence," which is the embodied experience of moving limbs, grasping objects, manipulating them and taking other actions. Using pi-zero, Physical Intelligence has demonstrated fine-tuning the AI model to get robots to fold laundry, make coffee, bus tables and assemble boxes. In the case of bussing a table, the robot had to identify the difference between trash and dishes. It would have to throw away trash into a bin while putting dishes into a bussing tray. However, it needed to get trash off plates, which it could learn to shake off before placing them in the tray. The company said the biggest challenge in creating a generalist model is the lack of large-scale multitask and multirobot data right now. As that data set grows, it will help provide a stepping stone for larger frontier generalist models for more capable dexterous robot brains. "We believe this is only a small early step toward developing truly general-purpose robot models," the company said. In the same way that LLMs are a foundation model for language, generalist robot models provide foundation AI for physical intelligence. There also exist similar robot control foundation models such as OpenVLA, a 7 billion-parameter open-source model, used commonly by academic researchers for experiments, and Octo, a 93 billion-parameter model. Parameters refer to the number of internal variables the model uses to make decisions and predictions. The company said its pi-zero outperformed OpenVLA and Octo on most complex tasks. Bringing "brains" to robots is becoming a long-term trend for the tech industry. Last year researchers from Google unveiled a robot using PaLM-E, a 562 million-parameter model, that could understand basic single voice commands such as picking up and delivering objects. Nvidia Corp. also announced Project GR00T, a general-purpose foundation model for bipedal humanoid robots earlier this year. "Our experiments so far show that such models can control a variety of robots and perform tasks that no prior robot learning system has done successfully, such as folding laundry from a hamper or assembling a cardboard box," the company said. "But generalist robot policies are still in their infancy, and we have a long way to go." To get there, Physical Intelligence said, it will not just take a lot more data, but also a collective effort from the entire robotics community. The company said that it has several collaborations with companies and robotics labs that will help refine hardware design and the use of data from partners for pretrained models to work toward that vision.

Jeff Bezos and OpenAI invest in robot startup Physical Intelligence at $2.4 billion valuation

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024 (L), and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021. Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC. Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, a Physical Intelligence spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are also listed as investors on the company's website. Physical Intelligence's new valuation is about six times that of its March seed round, which reportedly came in at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. Its current roster of employees includes alumni of Tesla, Google DeepMind and X. The startup focuses on "bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world," per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale AI models and algorithms to power robots. The startup spent the past eight months developing a "general-purpose" AI model for robots, the company wrote in a blog post. Physical Intelligence hopes that model will be the first step toward its ultimate goal of developing artificial general intelligence. AGI is a term used to describe AI technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks. The news comes days after OpenAI launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the AI startup to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft's Bing and Perplexity. Last month, OpenAI also closed its latest funding round at a valuation of $157 billion. Physical Intelligence's vision is that one day users can "simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants," the startup wrote in the blog post. In case studies, Physical Intelligence details how its tech could allow a robot to do laundry, bus tables or assemble a box.

This Robotics AI 'Brain' Startup Just Raised $400 Million From Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, and Others

The financing -- which has not yet been disclosed on Physical Intelligence's website but was reported by The New York Times and will reportedly go live today -- was led by Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, as well as two venture capital firms, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. The Times reports that the AI giant OpenAI as well as the investment firms Redpoint Ventures and Bond also participated. A spokesperson for Thrive Capital confirmed the details of the Times story to Inc. Physical Intelligence, which has not yet posted about the round on its blog, directed Inc. to that same spokesperson. "The fund-raising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments," Times reporter Michael J. de la Merced wrote. "That's significantly more than the $70 million that the start-up, which was founded this year, had raised in seed financing."

Robot Brain Startup Physical Intelligence Raises $400M At $2B Valuation

The San Francisco-based company had raised a $70 million seed round at a valuation of about $400 million back in March. Physical Intelligence is just the latest startup looking to use AI to improve how robots operate and create foundational software that could be used on a variety of robot models instead of having to create separate operating software for each individual model. "What we're doing is not just a brain for any particular robot," Karol Hausman, the company's co-founder and chief executive, told the Times. "It's a single generalist brain that can control any robot." Investors already have placed big bets in the intersection of robotics and its AI-enhanced foundational software -- especially Bezos. In February, Sunnyvale, California-based Figure, which is developing AI-enhanced robots that it hopes will be able to perform dangerous jobs and alleviate labor shortages, raised a huge $675 million round at a pre-money valuation of roughly $2 billion. That round included investments from Nvidia, Bezos' Explore Investments and others. In July, Pittsburgh-based Skild AI -- also developing brain models that can be used in a variety of robots and for different tasks -- raised a $300 million Series A led by Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SoftBank Group and Bezos, through his Bezos Expeditions. The funding valued the company at $1.5 billion. Overall, this has been a good year for robotics startups receiving funding.