Pittsburgh-based Skild AI closed a $1.4 billion Series C funding round on January 14, valuing the robotics artificial intelligence startup at over $14 billion—more than triple its $4.5 billion valuation from just seven months earlier. The massive raise signals intensifying investor conviction that general-purpose robotics software represents the next major AI frontier after large language models.
SoftBank Group led the financing with participation from Nvidia's NVentures, Macquarie Capital, Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions, and Trump-linked 1789 Capital. Strategic investors Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric, CommonSpirit Health, and Salesforce Ventures joined the round alongside existing backers Lightspeed, Felicis, Coatue, and Sequoia Capital who doubled down on their positions.
The funding comes as Skild AI demonstrates early commercial traction that distinguishes it from research-focused robotics labs. The company scaled from zero to approximately $30 million in revenue during 2025, deploying systems across security patrols, warehouses, manufacturing floors, data centers, and construction sites. Quadruped platforms automate inspection and surveillance while mobile manipulation systems allow enterprises to build robotics applications through simple API calls.
Skild AI's core technology is the Skild Brain, which the company describes as the industry's first unified robotics foundation model. Unlike traditional robotics systems tailored to specific hardware, the Skild Brain controls multiple robot types—quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms, and mobile manipulators—without requiring retraining for each form factor.
The technical breakthrough addresses robotics' fundamental data problem. While language models train on internet-scale text and image models learn from billions of photos, no comparable dataset exists for physical manipulation. Skild AI solves this by pre-training on human activity videos from the internet combined with physics-based simulations, enabling the model to develop generalized physical intuition.
The system demonstrates remarkable adaptability, adjusting in real-time to hardware failures, payload changes, or entirely new robot bodies through in-context learning rather than retraining. CEO and co-founder Deepak Pathak explained that "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."
The company plans enterprise deployments before targeting consumer applications, focusing capital on scaling model training infrastructure and expanding commercial rollouts. "Skild AI is building foundational technology for Physical AI across robots, tasks, and environments," said Dennis Chang, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. "We're proud to partner with Deepak, Abhinav, and the Skild AI team to bring that shared vision into real-world applications worldwide."
The raise marks one of the largest capital deployments in robotics-focused AI and brings Skild AI's total funding to over $1.83 billion since its 2023 founding. The trajectory mirrors the explosive growth in robotics startup funding broadly—the sector raised $13.8 billion in 2025, surpassing even the 2021 venture peak of $13.1 billion.
For enterprises evaluating robotics deployments, Skild AI's commercial momentum suggests foundation models may finally deliver the flexibility needed to justify investments beyond narrow automation tasks confined to controlled environments.
