Insider Brief
- Skild AI has raised nearly $1.4 billion in funding led by SoftBank Group, valuing the company at more than $14 billion and marking one of the largest capital raises to date for a robotics-focused AI startup.
- The round included participation from NVentures, Bezos Expeditions, Macquarie Capital, and new strategic investors including Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric, CommonSpirit Health, and Salesforce Ventures, alongside increased backing from Lightspeed, Felicis, Coatue, and Sequoia Capital.
- Skild AI is using the capital to scale development and deployment of its omni-bodied robotics foundation model, which is designed to control multiple robot types across enterprise environments such as logistics, manufacturing, data centers, and security without hardware-specific retraining.
Skild AI announced it has raised nearly $1.4 billion in new funding in a round led by SoftBank Group, valuing the robotics-focused artificial intelligence company at more than $14 billion and placing it among the most highly capitalized startups in the sector.
The financing included participation from NVentures, Macquarie Capital, Bezos Expeditions, Disruptive and 1789 Capital, according to Skild AI. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis, Coatue and Sequoia Capital increased their stakes. Strategic backers joining the round included Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric, CommonSpirit Health, and Salesforce Ventures, alongside a group of financial investors, the company said.
“The Skild Brain can control robots it has never trained on, adapting in real time to extreme changes in form or environments. The model is forced to adapt rather than memorize — much like intelligence in nature,” Skild AI CEO and co-founder Deepak Pathak said in a statement. “We believe that a unified, omni-bodied brain is the fastest way to establish a continuous data flywheel where the model gets better with every single deployment, no matter what the hardware or task.”
According to the Pittsburgh-based company, Skild AI is developing what it describes as a unified “foundation model” for robotics, designed to control a wide range of machines using a single system rather than models customized for individual robot designs. The company’s software, known as the Skild Brain, is intended to operate across different physical forms, including humanoids, quadrupeds, robotic arms and mobile platforms, according to the company.
Unlike conventional robotics systems that are trained for narrow tasks or fixed hardware, Skild AI says its model is trained to generalize across machines and environments. The company attributes this approach to the absence of a large, shared dataset comparable to the internet for language or vision models. Instead, Skild AI relies on a combination of video data derived from human activity and large-scale physics-based simulation to pretrain its system, according to the company.
“We believe this omni-bodied learning is essential for building AGI that works reliably in the physical world, paving the way for robots that can safely help humans in everyday environments,” noted Abhinav Gupta, Co-Founder and President of Skild AI. “This enables robots to operate dynamically in complex environments, without requiring preprogrammed instructions for each scenario.”
Skild AI says its software is designed to adapt to changing conditions in real time, including hardware failures or shifts in payload, without requiring retraining. The company positions this capability as a step toward making robotic systems more flexible in real-world settings, where conditions are less controlled than in laboratory or factory-floor pilots.
The company reported rapid early commercial traction, saying it grew from no revenue to roughly $30 million in revenue during 2025, driven by deployments across enterprise environments. Those include security and facility inspection, logistics and delivery, warehouses, manufacturing sites, data centers and construction-related tasks, according to Skild AI. Consumer applications, including use in homes, remain a longer-term objective, with enterprise deployments serving as the initial focus.
Skild AI said the new capital will be used primarily to scale model training, expand deployment capacity, and support continued development of its robotics software across additional hardware platforms. The company was founded in 2023 and operates out of Pittsburgh, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Bengaluru, India.
“Skild AI is building foundational technology for Physical AI across robots, tasks, and environments,” Dennis Chang, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in the funding announcement. “We’re proud to partner with Deepak, Abhinav, and the Skild AI team to bring that shared vision into real-world applications worldwide.”
