Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, Lux Capital, and Sequoia Capital also invest in the company, which is working on developing artificial physical intelligence.
With the mission of bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world, robot startup Physical Intelligence secured an investment of $400 million on Monday.
The San Francisco-based startup was valued at $2.4 billion after the funding round, led by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with contributions from OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Lux Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.
The latest valuation is a significant increase from its March seed round, valuing the robot startup at $400 million post a $70 million investment, according to Crunchbase.
Founded in 2023, Physical Intelligence has the long-term goal of developing artificial physical intelligence that users can ask to perform any task they want, similar to the widely popular large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants in use now.
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Karol Hausman, a former robotics scientist at Google; Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Lachy Groom, a former executive at Stripe, joined forces to start Physical Intelligence.
“Over the past eight months, we’ve developed a general-purpose robot foundation model that we call π0 (pi-zero),” the company’s blog said.
Last week, the robot startup published a paper demonstrating pi-zero’s capabilities of performing household tasks such as folding laundry, grocery bagging, and bussing tables.
Physical Intelligence shared that its model is trained on diverse data and can follow text instructions. However, the startup also added that the model had “a long way to go” and would see to the advancements on “reasoning and planning, autonomous self-improvement, robustness, and safety” frontiers within the next year.
This isn’t Bezos’ first investment in a robotic venture – Swiss robot-maker Swiss-Mile had a $100 million valuation in August and its funding round was backed by the Amazon founder.
While Physical Intelligence provides technical details about pi-zero on its website, it lacks discussion on the ethical implications of generative AI in robotics and its long-term repercussions. Only time will reveal the full impact of this innovation within the AI landscape.