companies

Skild AI

Trains a single general-purpose robot 'brain' meant to run across many different robot bodies and tasks, from warehouse arms to legged robots.

Skild AI is a Pittsburgh-based robotics AI company founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, built around a bet that a single large-scale foundation model, trained on a mix of simulation and real-world robot data, can generalize across robot form factors rather than needing a separate model per robot type. The company has grown quickly on that thesis, raising roughly $1.8 billion across seed, Series A, B, and C rounds, with backers including SoftBank, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Jeff Bezos, and Nvidia's venture arm, reaching a valuation above $14 billion by early 2026. Its core product, Skild Brain, was shown navigating unstructured outdoor environments around Pittsburgh, parks, sidewalks, obstacles the model had never encountered, and performing manipulation tasks with reported 60-80% success rates after only a few hours of task-specific data collection. Skild has stayed largely quiet about paying customers and specific commercial deployments relative to its funding size, which has drawn skepticism from parts of the robotics community about how far ahead of the field its model actually is versus how well-funded its story is.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Pittsburgh, United States

Sector

robotics