Skild AI Inc., a Pittsburgh-based robotics company that is "building a scalable foundation model for robotics," announced the closing of a $300 million series A funding round, one of the most sizable publicly disclosed investments the Pittsburgh tech sector has received this fiscal year.
"The large-scale model we are building demonstrates unparalleled generalization and emergent capabilities across robots and tasks, providing significant potential for automation within real-world environments," CEO and Co-founder Deepak Pathak said in a prepared statement. "We believe Skild AI represents a step change in how robotics will be scaled and has the potential to change the entire physical economy."
Pathak co-founded the company with Abhinav Gupta, who, together, have worked a combined 25 years at Carnegie Mellon University with robotics and AI. The team will include "robotics and AI experts" from Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Google and CMU as well.
The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group and Jeff Bezos, through Jeff Bezos Expeditions, bringing the company's total valuation to approximately $1.5 billion.
Stephanie Zhan, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who also participated in the round, said in a statement that through Skild AI, "a GPT-3 moment is coming to the world of robotics," referring to how the release of OpenAI's GPT-3 software rapidly advanced discussion and investment in the artificial intelligence space.
"[That moment] will spark a monumental shift that brings advancements similar to what we've seen in the world of digital intelligence to the physical world," Zhan said in a prepared statement. "Since partnering with Skild AI at the seed round, I have deep conviction that they are the team to pursue one of the most ambitious visions of our era."
Skild AI's long-term goal is to develop a form of artificial general intelligence, a form of AI that matches or surpasses human capabilities. The concept, which has grown increasingly discussed in the AI industry following the aforementioned release of GPT-3, has been met with both excitement and skepticism. An expert survey conducted in 2022 by AI organization AI Impacts found that 50% of researchers believed "high-level machine intelligence" could exist by 2059.
Within those who believe it could exist by 2059, potential timelines given are inconsistent. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, one of the most prominent figures in the sector, publicly said that he expected AGI to be achieved in "five years, give or take," in November of 2023.
For now, capital will be used to scale the company's model and training datasets, in addition to hiring more roles across the fields of AI, robotics, engineering, operations and security.
"Skild AI has achieved massive breakthroughs in a short period and we believe they're a one-of-a-kind company that could redefine our notions of what machines are capable of," Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said in a prepared statement. "Deepak and Abhinav have been catalysts of advancements in robotics and their innovation around leveraging the core principles of foundation models into the real world puts the industry on the path of general purpose robotics."
