Robotic teleoperation data startup XDOF launches with $70M in funding
Robotics training infrastructure startup XDOF said today it has raised $70 million in funding to try to solve one of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence: teaching machines the skills they need to safely navigate and work in the real world.
The round involved a number of heavyweight venture capitalists, including Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital and WndrCo. In addition to the money, the startup also released ABC-130K, which it says is the world’s largest open-source bimanual robot manipulation dataset. It will provide robotics researchers with access to an unprecedented amount of high-quality, freely available training data.
XDOF’s debut comes at a critical juncture, just weeks after OpenAI Group PBC announced it’s going to revive its own robotics training program that had been shut down in 2021. That move signified the growing interest in what’s known as “physical AI,” but frontier model makers face a significant challenge. While large language models can be trained on vast oceans of easily-accessible data from the internet, building intelligent robots requires much more nuanced data that captures very specific, real-world actions and interactions.
