Generalist hopes to make ‘general intelligence’ robotics a reality.

US AI robotics company Generalist has raised $400m at a reported $2bn valuation to accelerate its plans towards achieving “physical” artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures, Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, World Labs founder and leading AI expert Fei-Fei Li, and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.

Other participants include 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Norwest, Boldstart Ventures, Spark Capital, NFDG and serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant.

With a team of AI and robotics experts with experience across Big Tech, Generalist hopes to make “general intelligence” robotics a reality.

The company was founded in 2024 by former DeepMind scientists Pete Florence, Andy Zheng, and former Boston Dynamics roboticist and Harvard machine learning scientist Andrew Barry.

Generalist launched its Gen-0 class of AI models last November, which it said was trained on an “unprecedented” scale of real-world data. The company said the model proved that physical experience and larger models could predictably produce more capable systems.

In April, it launched Gen-1, which showed commercial viability, it added. Gen-1 was three-times faster than similar state-of-the-art models, showcasing 99pc reliability on diverse tasks and demonstrated the ability to learn new and complex physical skills, according to Generalist.

“Scaling robot learning creates better models, better models can do more useful physical work, and data from real businesses drives the next generation of more capable models,” the company said in a statement.

The new funding will allow Generalist to continue “scaling robot learning”, including building new models, scaling its physical data engine, expanding compute and training infrastructure and working with industries for commercialisation.

“Our goal is not to tie ourselves to any single method or label. Our goal is to build whatever is needed to make physical AGI real,” said the company.

The exact definition of AGI is difficult to pin down. According to Google, AGI refers to the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that allows it to “understand” or “learn” intellectual tasks that humans can, while IBM calls it the “abstract goal of AI development”, where human intelligence can be replicated by machines or software.

Robotics rise

The robotics industry has gained renewed energy in recent years, fuelled by AI. For the world’s biggest chipmaker Nvidia, robotics represents the biggest market for potential growth after AI.

Last month, Meta acquired US start-up Assured Robot Intelligence to reportedly pursue its plans for humanoid robotic hardware to help with household chores, and Amazon made its own robotics-related acquisition with Fauna Robotics in March.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s robotics software R&D company Intrinsic joined Google to work in close proximity with DeepMind, as well as tap into Google’s Gemini AI models and cloud services.

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