DEPLOYDatabase

Company

Skild AI

American robotics-AI company (Pittsburgh, founded 2023 by former Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta) building the 'Skild Brain', an…

Founded
2023
HQ
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Status
private

The verified answer

As of Aug 2026, DEPLOY verifies Skild AI: $1.8B raised. 10 sources back the record.

Funding

$1.8B

Employees

50

Overview

American robotics-AI company (Pittsburgh, founded 2023 by former Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta) building the 'Skild Brain', an omni-bodied foundation model designed to control any robot (quadruped, humanoid, arm, mobile manipulator) without per-body retraining, trained on human video and physics simulation. Raised a ~$1.4B round (Jan 2026, led by SoftBank, with NVIDIA's NVentures, Bezos expeditions, and others) at a ~$14B+ valuation; total funding reported >$2B. Builds the robot brain, not hardware.

Verified record

Verified deployments
None on file
Active incidents
None on file

Valuation of record

DEPLOY VERIFIED
$14Bas of Jan 2026

Priced roundSeries C post-money

See the full valuations ranking →

Key facts

What it is

Robot 'brain', omni-bodied foundation model (Skild Brain), not a hardware maker

Model

Skild Brain, controls any robot form (quadruped, humanoid, arm, mobile manipulator)

Early revenue/deployment

~$30M revenue 2025; security/inspection, last-mile, warehouses, data centers, assembly

Backerssee investors

SoftBank, NVentures, Bezos, Lightspeed, Coatue, Sequoia, Samsung, LG

Product

General-purpose robotic intelligence foundation model — transfers across robot bodies (humanoids, quadrupeds, arms)

Deployments

Nvidia and Foxconn factory testing — joint research with Carnegie Mellon University

Financial stage

Growth — $2B+ raised, $14B valuation, deploying in factories

Fetch Robotics acquisition

Acquired Zebra Technologies' robotics arm (formerly Fetch Robotics) — April 2026

Warehouse strategy

'Orchestration meets intelligence' — unified brain for autonomous warehouses

Data & sources

Press releases

2

News coverage

4

Web sources

4

10 sources backing this record.View all →

Partnerships

Every company Skild AI has built with, alongside the ones only announced in a press release.

3 total2 operating1 just announced1 ended

Most-frequent partners

  1. 1Amazon1× joint15 total
  2. 2Bezos Expeditions1× joint2 total
  3. 3Carnegie Mellon University1× joint1 total
  4. 4Coatue1× joint1 total
  5. 5Lightspeed Venture Partners1× joint1 total
  6. 6Sequoia Capital1× joint1 total

Relationships

Claims ledger

Public, dated claims by Skild AI, each tracked against the evidence. Status is a DEPLOY assessment from primary sources: verified means an independent source confirms it; contradicted means one refutes it; open means the outcome is not yet determinable. Every entry keeps its verbatim quote and source so you can check the call yourself.

  • OpenCapacity · claimed 2026-04-15
    Skild AI acquired Zebra Technologies' robotics arm (formerly Fetch Robotics). Major step toward fully autonomous warehouses. More robots. More environments. One unified brain.

Disagree with a status? Skild AI can submit a correction with evidence and we log the response on the record. Methodology and the full industry ledger live at /stats/claim-integrity.

Explainers

Plain-language answers to the questions people ask about Skild AI, from DEPLOY’s explainer library. Each is written in the language of the question and cross-checked against this registry.

What is a foundation model for robotics?
A foundation model for robotics extends the large-language-model paradigm to physical-action prediction. Trained on robot demonstrations rather than internet text alone, these models output action sequences (motor commands, manipulator trajectories) rather than text tokens. The category is dominated by vision-language-action (VLA) architectures that take camera images plus optional language instructions as input and produce action tokens as output. Companies building these models constitute the brain-provider tier of the robotics value chain, distinct from the humanoid OEM tier that builds the physical platforms the models run on.Read the full explainer →
What is Skild AI and the Skild Brain foundation model?
Skild AI is a US foundation-model-for-robotics company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, founded by Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta (both Carnegie Mellon University robotics-research alumni). The company's Skild Brain product is a vision-language-action (VLA) foundation model architected around a cross-platform general-purpose thesis: a single model trained to operate across multiple robot platforms rather than platform-specific brains. Skild has raised substantial 2024-2025 funding rounds; the company is privately held and represents a distinctive position in the brain-provider tier of the robotics value chain.Read the full explainer →
Which companies build foundation models for robotics, and how do they compare?
The brain-provider tier of robotics in 2026 includes several distinct strategic theses. Skild AI pursues cross-platform general-purpose brain deployment. Physical Intelligence (Pi-0; Pi-0.5) emphasizes transformer-based VLA research publications. Covariant specializes in warehouse-automation foundation models. Google DeepMind operates Gemini Robotics and RT-2 across AV and humanoid research. OpenAI Robotics relaunched in May 2026 after a 2021 hiatus. NVIDIA Project GR00T pursues cross-platform humanoid integration aligned with NVIDIA's broader stack. Meta operates research-publication-emphasizing work via FAIR and Reality Labs. The cohort is at research-and-demonstration verification depth; commercial-scale deployment lags behind humanoid OEM commercial deployment substantially.Read the full explainer →
What's the difference between robotics brain providers and robot makers?
Robotics value chain operates across three structural tiers. Brain-provider tier companies (Skild AI, Physical Intelligence, Covariant, Google DeepMind, OpenAI Robotics, NVIDIA Project GR00T) build foundation models for robotics without making hardware. OEM-platform tier companies (Figure AI, Apptronik, 1X Technologies, Tesla, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Unitree, UBTech) build robot hardware platforms with integrated brains. Deployment tier represents real-world operation at customer facilities (BMW Spartanburg, GXO Flowery Branch, Mercedes-Benz pilots). The three tiers operate complementarily; understanding which tier a company occupies is essential for evaluating its competitive position and verification posture.Read the full explainer →

Current leadership (2)

Founders (2)

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Safety record

No incidents on record for Skild AI.

Only active incidents are counted. Retracted incidents are excluded from this summary but remain reachable at their canonical URLs.

Full safety record: incidents, sourcing, and exposure data →

Brains developed (1)

Recent coverage

Skild AI in third-party press

Peers

144 peers across 1 segment. Every Skild AI competitor derived from shared form-factor and application-domain edges.

service(144)

113 companies in this segment · competitive (HHI 831.3520919269878) · leader Bond at 1957%