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 Ventures, Norwest, and Hanabi Capital. Existing backers Nvidia $NVDA and Bezos Expeditions, the investment vehicle associated with Amazon $AMZN 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 Communications CEO Eric Yuan also contributed funds.
The company traces its origins to 2024, when veterans of Google $GOOGL 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.
"It starts to cross in a general way into commercial viability for very simple tasks," Pete Florence told Bloomberg, describing GEN-1 as suited to short assignments, typically under a minute, with limited variable conditions. Generalist AI has customers using the model but has not disclosed their identities.
One challenge facing the company — and the robotics industry broadly — is the scarcity of training data. In response, the company developed hand-mimicking gripper devices and seeded them with contributors globally, amassing a dataset exceeding 500,000 hours of real-world robotic activity. "There's no internet of robotic data the way there's an internet for LLM data," Radical Ventures partner Rob Toews told Bloomberg.
The fundraise lands amid a broader surge of investment in physical AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently backed Alfred, a startup building software to reduce research and development timelines for robotics and automotive engineers. Meta $META acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup focused on AI models for robots, to advance its humanoid robotics effort.
Generalist AI said it plans to use the new capital to develop its next generation of models, expand its data collection infrastructure, and grow its computing resources.