Generalist AI

Skild AI's $1.4 billion Series C, led by SoftBank, and Figure AI's $1 billion Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital, are the two largest humanoid and embodied-AI rounds in MEKAWIRE's verified records since January 2025, and together make up 41% of the $5.86 billion disclosed across 22 rounds. Humanoid makers took 70% of disclosed money in 2025, but developers of robot foundation models have taken 71% in 2026 so far, and NVIDIA joined seven rounds without leading one.

A vision-language-action (VLA) model is one neural network that reads camera images and a plain-language instruction and outputs a robot's next motor commands, built by training a vision-language model on robot demonstrations. Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Figure AI, Skild AI and AgiBot lead, and the commercial race now turns on the cost of action data rather than model design.

D-Robotics, the robot-chip business Horizon Robotics stopped consolidating in March, said on 17 September 2026 it had closed a US$400 million Series C without naming a single investor or a valuation. The company says it has shipped more than 8 million Sunrise chips and that its newest S600 part won more than 20 robot customers within six months, including UBTECH, Fourier and Booster Robotics.

Generalist AI said on August 19, 2026 that GEN-1.5 can learn a new manipulation task from one demonstration of 3 to 12 seconds placed in its context, averaging 59% success over 10 tasks with no fine-tuning and 83% after 10 gradient steps on about 5 minutes of data. The company says the ability emerged from more than eight months of pretraining, but calls the tasks simple and the skills brittle, and has named no customers.

Generalist AI released GEN-1 on April 2, 2026, an embodied foundation model pretrained on more than 500,000 hours of human physical interaction data captured with wearable devices and no robot data. The company reports 99% average success on tasks where its previous model reached 64%, about one hour of robot data per task and task times roughly three times faster than the prior state of the art; the results are the company's own and have not been independently replicated.

NVIDIA used its GTC keynote on March 16, 2026 to preview Isaac GR00T N2, a robot foundation model built on its DreamZero world action model research that it says succeeds at new tasks in new environments more than twice as often as leading VLA models. It also put the 3-billion-parameter GR00T N1.7 into commercial early access and announced Cosmos 3 and Isaac Lab 3.0, with N2 due by the end of 2026.

Generalist AI introduced GEN-0 on November 4, 2025, a family of embodied foundation models that the company says improves predictably with more physical interaction data. It reported a capacity threshold at 7 billion parameters, models scaled past 10 billion, and a pretraining corpus of more than 270,000 hours growing by over 10,000 hours a week. The findings were published as a company blog post, not a peer-reviewed paper.

Dyna Robotics closed a US$120 million Series A on 15 September 2025, led by Robostrategy, CRV and First Round Capital with NVIDIA, Amazon, Salesforce, Samsung and LG venture arms joining, six months after a US$23.5 million seed. The Redwood City company did not disclose a valuation; it says its DYNA-1 model already runs paying deployments in hotels, restaurants, laundromats and gyms for up to 16 hours a day.

Physical Intelligence on 22 April 2025 published π0.5, a vision-language-action model that drove mobile manipulators through 10- to 15-minute cleaning jobs in three homes absent from its training set. The San Francisco start-up says co-training on data from other robots, web tasks and spoken coaching, rather than more home-robot data alone, is what lets the model generalise, and its own ablations show which ingredients matter most.