Industrial robotics startup RoboForce has secured $52 million in an oversubscribed funding round, bringing its total raised to $67 million. The round was led by YZi Labs, a $10 billion fund, with participation from Jerry Yang, along with existing investors including Myron Scholes, Gary Rieschel, and Carnegie Mellon University.
The funding will accelerate the development of RoboForce’s next-generation robot foundation models, scale production of general-purpose physical robots, and support the company’s transition from research to large-scale commercial deployment.
Addressing growing disparities in the industrial workforce
Many industries are finding it difficult to staff physically demanding jobs. Work that requires repetitive movements, exposure to extreme conditions, or safety risks is becoming increasingly difficult to attract workers. This shortage delays projects, increases operating costs, and creates new safety challenges for companies operating on an industrial scale.
RoboForce is positioning its technology to address that gap. The company’s platform focuses on what it calls “Robo-Labor.” It is an autonomous machine designed to handle high-risk, physically demanding tasks across sectors such as utility-scale solar installations, data centers, mines, logistics hubs, manufacturing sites, and global transportation operations.
Founded in California in 2023 by Leo Ma and Calvin Zhou, RoboForce brings together robotics and engineering talent from leading institutions and companies including Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, Amazon Robotics, Google, Waymo, Cruise, Tesla Robotics, ABB, and Apple.
By combining robotic hardware with a learning system that improves through real-world deployment, RoboForce aims to build a new class of machines that can perform critical industrial tasks at scale, helping industries operate more safely, efficiently, and consistently in environments where human labor is increasingly difficult to find.
Rather than building robots for narrow tasks, RoboForce develops systems that can operate across multiple industrial environments and adapt to real-world situations where unpredictability is the norm.
Physical AI agents designed for real-world tasks
At the core of RoboForce technology is a robot foundation model combined with a stack of physical AI agents that control the robot’s movements. These agents interpret real-world data and coordinate actions across the robot’s systems, ensuring the machine can perform complex physical tasks.
The platform is continuously improved through a data-driven learning loop. Information collected from deployed robots is fed back into the system, where it is combined with a high-fidelity simulation environment to adjust policies and behavior. Over time, this creates a self-reinforcing data cycle that steadily improves the robot’s capabilities.
To support this system, RoboForce is working with NVIDIA to enhance its computing and simulation infrastructure. The robot operates at the edge using NVIDIA Jetson Thor, and development and training leverages tools such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, NVIDIA Isaac Lab, NVIDIA Cosmos for synthetic data generation, and NVIDIA OSMO for cloud-to-edge orchestration.
Together, these technologies create a continuous data flywheel that allows robots to learn from both simulated and real-world environments, accelerating deployment in complex industrial environments.
From research prototypes to large-scale deployment
This investment will help RoboForce expand its business across three strategic priorities. First, the company plans to enhance its robotics foundation model and data infrastructure to enable the system to learn from all robots deployed in the field.
As part of this, RoboForce will enhance its manufacturing of physical AI robots and expand its global supply chain operations to ensure machines can operate reliably in harsh industrial conditions.
The company plans to focus on commercial expansion by turning the pilot program into a full-scale operational rollout and building recurring revenue streams across sectors with the greatest labor shortages.
“Robo-Labor is essential for boring, dirty, and dangerous jobs,” said Leo Ma, founder and CEO of RoboForce. “This issue focuses on the availability, cost, and safety of human workers, and its impact extends to the most critical industrial sectors. Our mission is to elevate humans to safer, higher-value roles and enable robots to take on the most demanding industrial tasks.”
