Genesis 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.

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.

Fauna Robotics said on 24 March 2026 that it had joined Amazon and would operate as an Amazon company, keeping its Sprout humanoid on sale and its customers supported; no terms were disclosed. The deal gives the operator of more than 1 million warehouse robots a small, safety-first humanoid used by Disney, Boston Dynamics, NYU and UC San Diego, and a team drawn from Google DeepMind and CTRL-labs.

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.

Sunday, the Silicon Valley developer of the Memo household robot, said on 12 March 2026 that it had raised an oversubscribed $165 million Series B at a $1.15 billion valuation, led by Coatue, with Coatue's Thomas Laffont joining the board. The company trains Memo on data from people wearing its Skill Capture Glove instead of teleoperating robots, plans an invite-only home beta from the autumn and expects to ship at scale in 2027-2028.

Mind Robotics, the industrial AI robotics company founded and led by Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe, said on March 11, 2026 that Accel and Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $500 million Series A, about four months after a $115 million seed. Rivian's filings show it deconsolidated the start-up in March, valued its remaining 37.6% at about $569 million using the Series A share price and recorded a $506 million gain, which by MEKAWIRE arithmetic implies an equity value near $1.51 billion.

Palo Alto start-up Rhoda AI emerged on 10 March 2026 with a $450 million Series A from Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, Temasek and six other institutions, plus John Doerr. Its Direct Video Action model predicts video of a task and converts it into robot actions, and the company says new tasks can need as little as ten hours of teleoperation data. No lead investor, valuation or customer was disclosed.

Robot foundation model developer Physical Intelligence has raised $600 million at a $5.6 billion valuation in a Series B led by Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG, according to its investors. The round followed the release of π*0.6, a model the company says more than doubles throughput on hard tasks after reinforcement learning on real robots.

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.

Skild AI on July 29, 2025 named and described its robotics foundation model, the Skild Brain, a two-layer system pre-trained on simulation and internet video that the company says runs across quadrupeds, humanoids, table-top arms and mobile manipulators. The launch carried no customers or prices, but set out the body-agnostic strategy that later underpinned a $14 billion-plus valuation and more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Genesis AI, a physical AI lab based in Paris and Palo Alto, came out of stealth on July 1, 2025 with $105 million co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, with Bpifrance, HSG, Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel also investing. The company, which later called the round seed funding, plans a universal robotics foundation model trained on a data engine that mixes in-house physics simulation, generative modelling and real robot data, and did not disclose a valuation.

Beijing embodied AI start-up Galbot completed a RMB 1.1 billion financing in June 2025 led by battery maker CATL and Puquan Capital, with China Development Bank's CDB Science and Technology Innovation, the Beijing Robotics Industry Fund and GGV Capital also investing, according to the Zhongguancun Science City administration. The deal took the company's funding over two years past RMB 2.4 billion and gave its synthetic data approach to robot learning a strategic industrial backer.

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.