In January 2026, the Pittsburgh-based physical AI pioneer Skild AI secured a massive $1.4 billion Series C funding round. The investment was led by SoftBank Group, with significant participation from NVIDIA’s NVentures, Macquarie Capital, Jeff Bezos (Bezos Expeditions), and doubling-down support from Lightspeed, Coatue, and Sequoia.
The company is led by Co-Founder and CEO Deepak Pathak and President Abhinav Gupta. Skild AI is building the “Skild Brain,” the industry’s first omni-bodied foundation model designed to operate any robot—from quadrupeds and humanoids to industrial arms—across a near-infinite variety of tasks.
Historically, robotics has been hindered by data scarcity and hardware-specific software. Skild addresses this by training on diverse internet videos and high-fidelity physics simulations, allowing its model to adapt to new morphologies with zero-shot generalization. This shift toward a “Universal Brain” mirrors the modular scaling seen in high-performance CPU architectures, where a single logic layer powers a multitude of edge devices.
The new capital, which values Skild at over $14 billion, will be used to scale the foundation model for Fortune 500 deployments in manufacturing and logistics. By enforcing high-fidelity physical reasoning, Skild provides a level of operational safety similar to AI-native logic enforcement layers, ensuring that autonomous machines interact with the physical world with human-like precision.
Market Signal
- The “Brain-First” Dominance: Skild’s $1.4B round validates that the value in robotics is shifting from proprietary hardware to robot-agnostic software. This “Software-Defined Robotics” model allows enterprises to retrofit existing fleets with advanced AI, similar to how modular warehouse systems are replacing rigid infrastructure.
- Strategic Sovereignty: With strategic backing from Samsung, LG, and Schneider Electric, Skild is effectively becoming the standard “Operating System” for global industrial giants. This massive coalition of hardware titans creates a moat that standalone humanoid startups may struggle to breach.
- The End of the Data Bottleneck: By successfully distilling internet-scale video data into physical motor commands, Skild has unlocked a scalable path to AGI in the real world. This capability turns every camera feed into a training set, accelerating robot learning cycles by orders of magnitude compared to manual data labeling.
Key Details
- Company: Skild AI
- Funding: $1.4B Series C ($14B+ Valuation)
- Headquarters: Pittsburgh, PA
- Lead Investor: SoftBank Group
- CEO: Deepak Pathak
- Use Case: Omni-bodied foundation models, general-purpose robotics brain, and zero-shot physical task adaptation
