Generalist AI announced $400 million in new funding on Thursday, bringing the robotics startup to a $2 billion valuation and pushing its total capital raised to more than half a billion dollars.
Radical Ventures led the round. New institutional investors include 8VC, Union Square $SQ NaN% Ventures, Norwest, and Hanabi Capital. Existing backers Nvidia $NVDA -2.39% and Bezos Expeditions, the investment vehicle associated with Amazon $AMZN -0.38% founder Jeff Bezos, also participated. Angel investors joining the round include Xiaomi co-founder Lin Bin, AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, and Naval Ravikant, according to Bloomberg. Zoom $ZM -2.78% Communications CEO Eric Yuan also contributed funds.
The company traces its origins to 2024, when veterans of Google $GOOGL -0.73% DeepMind and Boston Dynamics came together to build AI models capable of driving robotic performance across varied environments and hardware configurations. Before starting Generalist AI, CEO Pete Florence held a senior scientist role at DeepMind, where his work included contributing to RT-2, an early vision-and-language robotics model, SiliconAngle reported. CTO Andrew Barry came from Boston Dynamics.
The company's latest model, GEN-1, released in April, is designed to handle dexterous physical tasks with 99% reliability across diverse assignments and at speeds up to 3 times faster than prior benchmarks, the company said. GEN-1 is also built to recover from unexpected physical situations — a gripper losing its hold, a component that won't seat properly, or material that behaves differently than anticipated.
