Skild AI, a startup developing AI software for robots, raised $1.4 billion in a funding round that features a number of big-name investors. The Pittsburgh company is now valued at $14 billion, a tripling of its valuation since last summer.
Japan’s SoftBank led the Series C funding round with participation from Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, Bezos Expeditions, Macquarie Capital, Disruptive, and Florida’s 1789 Capital, of which Donald Trump Jr is a partner. New strategic investors include Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric and Salesforce Ventures.
Skild AI’s stated mission is to build a single, general-purpose artificial brain that can control any robot for any task.
The company said its unified robotics foundation model, Skild Brain, is at the heart of this effort. It described the model as an industry first.
“Unlike traditional models that are tailored to specific robot designs, the Skild Brain is omni-bodied and can control any robot without prior knowledge of their exact body form, including quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms, and mobile manipulators,” according to a press release.
This enables the model to cope with a variety of tasks, ranging from basic household chores such as loading a dishwasher to more demanding physical challenges such as crossing slippery terrain, according to the company.
The Skild Brain has been trained by watching online videos of humans performing tasks and via physical simulations with thousands of form factors. In contrast to robots created for specific applications or restricted environments, this type of In-Context Learning, as the company calls it, enables robots to develop a diverse skill set and to be deployed in diverse scenarios, all the time collecting data, improving performance and increasing adaptability.
“The Skild Brain can control robots it has never trained on, adapting in real time to extreme changes in form or environments,” CEO Deepak Pathak said in a press release. “The model is forced to adapt rather than memorize — much like intelligence in nature. We believe that a unified, omni-bodied brain is the fastest way to establish a continuous data flywheel where the model gets better with every single deployment, no matter what the hardware or task.”
The company has grown rapidly over the past couple of years, and achieved $30 million in revenue in 2025. It said the latest capital injection will be used to scale its model training, with the ultimate goal of deploying robotics in the home. Initially, however, the focus is likely to be on enterprise usage.
