Robotics Startup Genesis AI in Talks to Raise $500M

A robotics startup that only came out of stealth a year ago is now in talks to raise half a billion dollars, a valuation jump that captures just how fast capital is moving into physical AI right now. Genesis AI is negotiating a roughly $500 million funding round that would value the company at about $3 billion before the new money, according to Bloomberg's reporting on the discussions. Premji Invest is reportedly negotiating to lead the round, with HSG, formerly Sequoia China, and Northzone weighing additional investment.

Genesis emerged from stealth in July 2025 with a $105 million seed round co-led by Eclipse Ventures and Khosla Ventures, one of the larger seeds of that year, backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, French billionaire Xavier Niel, French public bank Bpifrance, and HSG, according to TheNextWeb's coverage of the new round.

Genesis is building foundation models designed to run inside a wide range of robots, essentially betting that the "brain" powering robotic intelligence will become more valuable than any single hardware form factor. The company was co-founded by Zhou Xian, a Carnegie Mellon robotics PhD who serves as CEO, and Théophile Gervet, a former research scientist at Mistral AI, running offices in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area with roughly 60 employees split evenly between Europe and the U.S.

The company unveiled its first model, GENE-26.5, demonstrating advanced dexterous tasks using robotic hands built in partnership with Chinese company Wuji Tech, according to TechCrunch's earlier reporting on the demo. More recently, Genesis unveiled Eno, a wheeled industrial robot the company says can reason beyond predefined tasks and adapt based on varying outcomes, positioning it as an alternative to the humanoid robot hype dominating much of the sector.

Genesis isn't operating in an uncrowded space. Generalist AI, a competing team with DeepMind and Boston Dynamics backgrounds, raised $400 million earlier this year for its own robotics foundation model, GEN-1, backed by Nvidia's NVentures, Bezos Expeditions, and Fei-Fei Li. Figure AI, taking a different vertically integrated approach building both hardware and intelligence, is valued at $39 billion. The defining question across this entire category, worth understanding alongside our broader AI industry statistics coverage, is whether hardware-first or intelligence-first companies ultimately capture more value as physical AI scales.

In my four years in sales at a research and advisory firm, I heard directly from CMOs and CEOs about what they wanted from AI, and physical, industrial applications rarely came up compared to office productivity tools, a pattern that's shifting quickly as capital increasingly flows toward robotics foundation models rather than just chatbots. Genesis's rapid valuation growth, from $105 million to a reported $3 billion in roughly 12 months, mirrors the thesis behind Arrakis's recent $38 million industrial AI raise we covered this week, that the biggest untapped AI opportunity sits in physical operations, not desk work.

For businesses in manufacturing, logistics, or any physical operations context, this funding surge is worth watching as a signal that genuinely capable, adaptable robotics intelligence may become commercially available faster than many expect.

Genesis AI is in talks to raise about $500 million at a roughly $3 billion valuation, just over a year after emerging from stealth with a $105 million seed round. The company builds foundation models designed to power a wide range of robots, competing with rivals like Generalist AI and Figure AI in the fast-growing physical AI category. The round would mark one of the steepest valuation increases in robotics AI over the past year.