Skild AI has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round to build artificial intelligence (AI) models for robotics.
The company will use the new funding to expand its team and continue to expand its models and training datasets in preparation for future commercial deployment of its technology, Skild AI said in a press release on Tuesday (July 9).
“Having a general-purpose robot that can safely perform any automation task in any environment, in any form, would help scale robotics capabilities, democratize costs, and support labor markets with severe labor shortages,” Abhinav Gupta, president and co-founder of Skild AI, said in the release.
According to the release, Skilled's model is designed as a “shared, universal brain” for a variety of robots, scenarios and tasks, with the goal of enabling low-cost robots to be used across a wide range of industries and applications, as opposed to being designed for a specific application.
The company's latest funding round was announced to have been led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions.
“Skild AI has made great strides in a short amount of time and we believe it is a unique company well positioned to redefine what machines are capable of,” Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said in the release.
“Skild's technology has the potential to disrupt today's physical economy by introducing robots to dangerous jobs like machine rooms and containment facilities, as well as sectors with severe labor shortages like security and hospitals,” Sri Viswanath, general partner at Coatue, said in a press release.
New advances in AI are enabling companies to develop robots with better capabilities and more effective human interaction, PYMNTS reported in February.
On July 3, Sanctuary AI raised new funding as part of its efforts to create “human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots,” bringing the company's total investment to more than $140 million.
In March, a new company called Physical Intelligence announced its launch, saying it wanted to develop AI to power “the robots of today and the physically actuated devices of the future.”