Key Points
- Skilled AI has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.
- The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos via Bezos Expeditions.
- Skid AI is developing scalable, general-purpose AI models for robotics that are trained on far more data points than its competitors.
- The company aims to solve severe labor shortages in industries such as healthcare, construction, warehousing and manufacturing.
Skild AI has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos via Bezos Expeditions. The Series A round also included Felicis Ventures, Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, CRV, Amazon, SV Angel, and Carnegie Mellon University. The capital infusion values Skild AI at $1.5 billion.
Skid AI is at the forefront of developing scalable base models for robotics, differentiating itself by training its models on exponentially more data points than its competitors.
The company’s goals are: A shared general-purpose brain that can power a wide range of robots for a variety of tasks, including manipulation, locomotion, and navigation. This approach contrasts sharply with the industry standard of designing robots for specific vertical applications.
“The large-scale models we are building demonstrate unparalleled generalization and novel capabilities across robots and tasks, offering significant potential for automation in real-world environments,” said Deepak Pathak, CEO and co-founder of Skild AI. “We believe Skild AI represents a step change in how robotics scales, and has the potential to transform the entire physical economy.”
Skild AI’s technology aims to solve severe labor shortages across a variety of industries. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that there are 1.7 million more job openings than available workers, and the National Association of Manufacturers predicts that 2.1 million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled by 2030. Skild AI envisions general-purpose robots that work alongside humans in fields such as healthcare, construction, warehouses, and manufacturing, as well as performing hazardous tasks such as oil rigs and machine rooms.
“With general purpose robots that can safely perform any automated task, in any environment, across any type of implementation, we can expand the capabilities of robotics, democratize their cost, and support severely under-skilled labor markets,” added Abhinav Gupta, President and Co-founder of Skild AI.
There is a palpable excitement among investors about Skild AI’s potential. Raviraj Jain, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, praised the company’s rapid progress and its potential to redefine machine capabilities. “Deepak and Abhinav have been catalysts for the advancement of robotics, and their innovation in leveraging core principles of foundational models into the real world is putting the industry on the path to general-purpose robotics,” Jain said.
Stephanie Zhan, a partner at Sequoia Capital, compared Skild AI’s breakthrough to the disruptive impact of GPT-3 in digital intelligence. “The GPT-3 moment is coming to the robotics world,” she said, emphasizing her confidence in the company’s vision following the seed round.
The founders, who are professors at Carnegie Mellon University and have 25 years of experience in robotics and AI, have played a key role in numerous industrial innovations. Their expertise and the strong Skild AI team, which includes talent from Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and top universities, highlight the company’s ability to revolutionize the robotics field.
“A scalable approach to building foundational models for robot manipulation and movement could revolutionize robotics, moving from pre-programmed robots to dynamic, adaptive robots,” said Sri Viswanath, General Partner at Coatue and former CTO of Atlassian.
With this significant funding, Skild AI plans to expand its models and training datasets for future commercial deployment, and to expand its team across multiple domains. The company’s long-term goal is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) rooted in the physical world, challenging the common belief that AGI can only come from digital knowledge.
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