Generalist AI raises $400M at $2B valuation to build general intelligence for robotics
Artificial intelligence startup Generalist AI Inc., a startup building embodied robotics intelligence, said today it has raised $400 million in new funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $2 billion.
Radical Ventures led the round. Additional investors included 8VC, Union Square Ventures and Hanabi Capital, with existing supporters Nvidia Corp. and Bezos Expeditions joining the round as well. Nvidia’s participation reflects the company’s continued interest in robotics and the physical infrastructure of artificial intelligence, which it claims will be the next trillion-dollar industry.
The company was founded by Pete Florence, a former DeepMind senior scientist who helped create RT-2, a robotic control system for vision-language-action models that transfers knowledge from real-world actions, and PaLM-E, an early AI model for robotics that provides a framework for AI-powered vision- and language-based instruction. On the founding team, Florence is joined by Chief Scientist Andy Zeng and Chief Technology Officer Andrew Barry, formerly a roboticist with Boston Dynamics Inc.
Generalist AI’s most recent contribution to that industry is GEN-1, released in April, a highly capable AI foundation model for robot learning showing mastery of physical tasks.
