Skild AI funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Skild AI builds a single AI model, called the Skild Brain, that can control many kinds of robots. The same model runs on four-legged robots, humanoids, factory arms, and mobile robots that move goods around warehouses. The Pittsburgh company does not build robots: it sells the software that makes other companies' robots useful.

Skild AI has raised more than $2 billion across four rounds since it was founded in 2023, according to CEO Deepak Pathak. Its last round, a Series C of close to $1.4 billion led by SoftBank, closed in January 2026. Only two of its four rounds were announced by the company, so part of the total rests on investor reports.

Its backers include SoftBank, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Lightspeed, Sequoia, and Coatue, plus robot and electronics makers such as Samsung and LG. Let's dive into Skild AI's funding history.

Skild AI has raised four times in about two and a half years. Each of the last two rounds roughly tripled the price of the one before.

Skild AI was founded in 2023 by Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, two professors at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Both had worked as research scientists at Facebook's AI Research lab. Pathak runs the company as CEO and Gupta serves as president.

Lightspeed and Sequoia co-led a $14.5 million seed round in the second half of 2023. The company has never published a date or valuation for it. Less than a year later, in July 2024, Skild AI came out of stealth with a $300 million Series A at a $1.5 billion valuation, which Lightspeed called one of the largest early-stage investments it had ever made.

The Series A brought in four co-leads at once: Lightspeed, Coatue, SoftBank, and Jeff Bezos through his family office, Bezos Expeditions. Carnegie Mellon, the founders' employer, also invested, as did two Amazon funds, the Industrial Innovation Fund and the Alexa Fund.

The Series B was never announced. Bloomberg reported in January 2025 that SoftBank was negotiating a $500 million investment at about $4 billion.

In June, Bloomberg said SoftBank had put in $100 million, Nvidia $25 million, and Samsung $10 million at a valuation of about $4.5 billion, with LG, Hanwha, and Mirae Asset also backing the company. PitchBook data cited by Reuters puts the round at $500 million and $4.7 billion instead.

Skild AI launched the Skild Brain in July 2025 and began its first paid deployments a few months later.

In December, Reuters reported that SoftBank and Nvidia were in talks to invest more than $1 billion at about $14 billion. The Series C closed on January 14, 2026, at close to $1.4 billion, and Lightspeed, Felicis, Coatue, and Sequoia all added to their stakes. TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg, reported that Pathak put total funding at more than $2 billion.

Skild AI's valuation rose more than ninefold in the 18 months between its Series A and its Series C. Most of that climb came before the company had meaningful revenue, so the early prices reflect research demos and investor demand rather than sales.

The Series B tripled the Series A price in about 11 months. Investors were paying for research results. The Skild Brain had not launched yet, and the company had no paying customers.

The Series C tripled the price again in seven months. By then, the company said it had reached about $30 million in revenue within months of its first deployments in 2025. No secondary sale or new round has repriced Skild AI since, and the private-market platform Forge still lists the Series C as its latest valuation.

The closest comparison is Physical Intelligence's funding rounds, which also climbed with each round and reached about $11 billion in 2026. Skild AI has kept the higher valuation of the two and is the only one with a disclosed revenue figure. How the shares are split between the founders, employees, and investors is not public.

Skild AI's cap table has three layers: venture funds that backed the founders before the product existed, a few very large strategic backers led by SoftBank and Nvidia, and a long tail of corporations that might one day be customers. None of the investors has disclosed a stake or a board seat.

SoftBank co-led the Series A, led the Series B, and led the Series C. No other investor has led or co-led three rounds. Founder Masayoshi Son has made robots and "physical AI" a core theme of SoftBank's strategy, and SoftBank's founder-controlled ownership lets it make long, concentrated bets like this one.

SoftBank is also buying a robot maker. In October 2025, it agreed to pay $5.375 billion for ABB's robotics division, which sells industrial arms to car and electronics factories. Skild AI announced a partnership with ABB Robotics in March 2026 to put its model on those arms. The ABB robotics division sale was still waiting for regulatory approval in September 2026.

SoftBank has bet on robots before. It bought Boston Dynamics in 2017 and sold it to Hyundai in 2021, a history covered in how Boston Dynamics is owned.

Nvidia invested about $25 million in the Series B, according to Bloomberg, and its venture arm NVentures returned for the Series C. Reuters reported in December 2025 that Nvidia and SoftBank were the two investors driving the round.

The relationship runs in both directions. Skild AI trains its models in simulation with Nvidia's Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab software, and its model runs on robots that assemble Nvidia's Blackwell server racks at a Foxconn plant in Houston. Nvidia is also a paying customer.

Robots are still a small line in Nvidia's robotics and automotive business, and backing the software that runs on them is a way to sell more chips into that market.

Lightspeed and Sequoia co-led the seed, and both invested again in the Series A and the Series C. Lightspeed partner Raviraj Jain said at the Series A that Skild AI could redefine what machines are capable of. Sequoia's Stephanie Zhan predicted a "GPT-3 moment" for robotics.

Coatue co-led the Series A and added to its stake in the Series C. Felicis joined in the Series A and also put in more in 2026.

Bezos co-led the Series A through Bezos Expeditions and returned for the Series C. He has also backed Physical Intelligence, so his bet is on robot software as a category as much as on one company.

Two Amazon funds, the Industrial Innovation Fund and the Alexa Fund, joined the Series A. Amazon runs one of the largest robot fleets in logistics, and Bezos's personal fortune still rests mostly on his remaining Amazon stake.

Samsung invested about $10 million in the Series B and returned in 2026. LG came in through LG Technology Ventures and the IT services arm LG CNS, then joined the Series C.

Both conglomerates make robots and appliances, and both could become customers as well as shareholders. Control of LG still sits with the founding Koo family, as LG's family-controlled ownership shows.

The Series C added Schneider Electric, which sells factory and data center equipment, the hospital operator CommonSpirit, and Salesforce Ventures. Financial investors included Macquarie Capital, 1789 Capital, Disruptive, and Mirae Asset. IQT, the venture firm that invests on behalf of US intelligence agencies, also took part.

Zebra Technologies became a shareholder in April 2026, when Skild AI bought its robotics unit for cash plus an equity stake in Skild AI. The terms were not disclosed.

Skild AI spends its money on computing power, training data, and the teams that put robots to work at customer sites. It has also started buying businesses that bring customers with them.

Robots cannot learn from text on the internet the way chatbots do, so the hard part is data. Skild AI trains on four sources: human operators steering robots by remote control, videos of people doing tasks, simulation, and data-capture gloves. Pathak has said most rivals lean on one source, while Skild AI combines all four.

That mix is expensive. S1, the flagship model released in August 2026, was pretrained on about 100,000 hours of data and can learn a new task, such as making coffee or repotting a plant, from a single video of a person doing it.

The Series C announcement named scaling these data sources and research on new model designs as the first two uses of the money. Simulation and training runs on that scale need large amounts of computing power.

The Series C announcement named real-world deployments as the third use of the money. Its model now runs at customer sites, from Nvidia's server lines in Houston to wire harness plants at Sumitomo Wiring Systems and food operations tied to Mitsui & Co.

In April 2026, Skild AI bought the robotics division of Zebra Technologies, the former Fetch Robotics. Zebra had paid about $290 million for Fetch in 2021 before deciding to close the unit in December 2025. Skild AI took over the Fetch mobile robots, the Symmetry fleet software, the installed base of customers, and the team, which Pathak called the main reason for the deal.

Skild AI sells its model to companies that run robots, and the more robots it runs on, the more data it gets to improve the next model. In September 2026, the company said it had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue 10 months after its first commercial deployment, and had recognized $50 million in revenue so far.

It counts more than 60 paying customers, up from eight at the start of 2026, and hundreds of robots running its software. About 90% of revenue comes from manipulation work by robot arms. Mobility, including the Fetch robots, makes up the remaining 10%.

Skild AI's growth focus is factories and warehouses, where robot arms and mobile robots already do paid work. The ABB Robotics and Universal Robots partnerships put its model on two of the most widely used industrial arm brands, and the Fetch deal gives it a sales channel into US warehouses. Its customer list now runs from electronics assembly to security patrols, data centers, and Japanese cafes.

On the product side, S1 shifts the pitch from robots that need training for each task to robots that can be shown a task once. The company has said that real deployments, not demos, now drive its research, because each customer site adds data that improves the shared model. Skild AI has not announced a new round, a tender offer, or IPO plans since January 2026, and it is not known to carry debt.

The main risks are price and competition. At more than $14 billion, the Series C valued Skild AI at about 140 times its September run rate, so the next round depends on revenue keeping up its pace. Rivals include Physical Intelligence, Field AI, Google DeepMind's robotics team, and Nvidia's own open robot models, while AI companies took about half of global startup funding in 2025. SoftBank's pending purchase of ABB Robotics also makes Skild AI's lead investor the owner of one of its hardware partners, which could shape how other robot makers view the company.

Skild AI has raised more than $2 billion across four rounds, according to CEO Deepak Pathak. The disclosed rounds are a $14.5 million seed in 2023, a $300 million Series A in July 2024, an unannounced Series B in mid-2025, and a Series C of close to $1.4 billion in January 2026. The company has not reported any debt.

Skild AI's lead investors are SoftBank, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Coatue, and Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions. Other backers include Nvidia, Felicis, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Carnegie Mellon University, Amazon, Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric, Salesforce Ventures, Macquarie Capital, and 1789 Capital.

Skild AI was valued at more than $14 billion in its January 2026 Series C, led by SoftBank. That is more than triple the roughly $4.5 billion it was valued at in mid-2025. No round or secondary sale has set a new price since.

No. Skild AI is a private company and has not filed for an IPO. Its shares are not traded on any stock exchange.

Skild AI is owned by its co-founders, Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, its employees, and its investors. SoftBank has put in the most money of any outside backer, having led or co-led three of the four rounds. Individual stakes have not been disclosed.