Who owns Physical Intelligence (Pi)? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Physical Intelligence builds what it describes as general-purpose intelligence for robots. Its flagship model, pi-zero, is designed to allow robots to learn and perform physical tasks in real-world environments: folding laundry, assembling products, sorting objects. The ambition is to do for robotics what large language models have done for text: create a single foundation model that can be fine-tuned for a wide range of physical tasks across different robot bodies and environments.

The company was founded in early 2024, launched its first model in late 2024, open-sourced it in February 2025, and has since advanced the series through π0.5, π0.6, and π0.7, released in April 2026. By March 2026, it was reportedly seeking about $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, a round still unconfirmed as of July 2026. Few companies in any sector have reached that scale that quickly from founding.

Understanding who owns Physical Intelligence matters because the company is building technology that could reshape industrial automation, logistics, elder care, and home robotics. Ownership determines who benefits from that transformation and who controls the direction of development.

Physical Intelligence was founded in early 2024 by seven co-founders who had spent careers at the intersection of AI and robotics:

The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Its flagship product, pi-zero (written as π0), is a generalist robot policy model trained to handle tasks requiring physical dexterity. The model was launched in October 2024 and open-sourced in February 2025, a move that positioned Physical Intelligence as both a commercial enterprise and a contributor to the open robotics research ecosystem. In April 2025, the company introduced π0.5, an upgraded vision-language-action model built for open-world generalization. It followed with π0.6 in November 2025, which added reinforcement learning from real-world experience, and π0.7 in April 2026, a steerable model built for stronger generalization.

Total disclosed funding exceeds $1.07 billion across three rounds. The company was reportedly in talks to raise an additional $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in March 2026, which would push total funding above $2 billion before its third birthday. That round had not been confirmed closed as of July 2026.

Physical Intelligence has no public shares and has not disclosed any IPO plans. Ownership is distributed among the seven co-founders, employees, and a growing list of institutional and strategic investors. Exact ownership percentages have not been publicly disclosed.

Each of the seven co-founders holds an equity stake of undisclosed size. Because the company has raised significant capital across multiple rounds at rapidly escalating valuations, those stakes have been subject to ongoing dilution. The founding team retains operational control as the company's senior leadership, though no specific governance arrangements, such as dual-class shares or founder-protective voting provisions, have been publicly reported.

Karol Hausman as CEO is the primary decision-maker and public face of the company. Sergey Levine and Chelsea Finn are both active academic researchers who hold joint appointments at UC Berkeley and Stanford respectively. Their dual roles as co-founders and university faculty mean the company maintains deep ties to frontier robotics research outside of its own labs.

Physical Intelligence has completed three disclosed funding rounds in rapid succession:

Note: Physical Intelligence's ~$70M seed (March 2024) and $400M Series A (November 2024) are consistently reported as separate rounds. Thrive Capital led the seed; Jeff Bezos led the Series A.

CapitalG, the growth investment arm of Alphabet (Google's parent company), led the $600 million Series B in November 2025. This is a significant strategic signal: Alphabet's investment vehicle chose Physical Intelligence as its primary bet in the generalist robotics AI category. CapitalG typically takes board seats in its investments.

Thrive Capital led the ~$70 million seed round in March 2024 and returned for later rounds. The firm is also one of the largest backers of OpenAI.

OpenAI participated in the seed, Series A, and Series B rounds. This mirrors OpenAI's investment in Harvey: the organization is simultaneously a potential model provider, a competitor in AI infrastructure, and a financial backer.

Jeff Bezos led the $400 million Series A as an angel investor. Bezos has made individual investments in robotics and space technology alongside his involvement in Amazon Robotics and Blue Origin.

NVIDIA (through its NVentures investment arm) participated in the Series B, consistent with its broader strategy of backing AI companies that will drive demand for GPU computing.

Other Series B investors include Lux Capital, Bond, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and T. Rowe Price.

Founders Fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners are reported to be in discussions for the potential Series C round alongside Thrive Capital and Lux Capital.

Physical Intelligence has not announced any IPO plans. Given that the company was founded in 2024 and has not yet reached commercial scale in terms of revenue, a public offering would be premature. The focus through 2026 appears to be on expanding the capabilities of pi-zero, developing commercial partnerships with robot manufacturers, and raising additional capital to fund R&D and compute infrastructure.

Hausman co-founded Physical Intelligence after spending years at Google DeepMind, where he worked on robot learning and foundation models for physical tasks. His research background spans reinforcement learning, multi-task robot policies, and sim-to-real transfer, the technical challenge of training robots in simulation and deploying them in real environments.

As CEO, Hausman leads the company's commercial strategy and fundraising, while maintaining direct involvement in research direction. His prior work at Google DeepMind gives him credibility with both the research community and the institutional investors who evaluate deep tech companies.

Groom is the company's President and a former Stripe executive. He leads Physical Intelligence's fundraising and commercial strategy, and has been the public voice on the company's decision to delay commercialization in favor of research. Alongside Hausman, he is central to how the company raises and allocates capital.

Levine holds a joint appointment as UC Berkeley professor and Physical Intelligence co-founder. He is one of the most widely cited researchers in robot learning, known for his work on deep reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and offline reinforcement learning. His academic role means Pi benefits from Berkeley's research ecosystem, graduate student pipeline, and proximity to other frontier AI labs.

Finn is a Stanford professor who pioneered work on model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), a technique for training AI systems to learn new tasks quickly from limited examples. In robotics, this is directly relevant to physical intelligence: robots need to adapt to new environments and tasks without requiring massive amounts of task-specific training data.

The full board of directors has not been publicly disclosed. CapitalG, as the lead Series B investor, almost certainly holds a board seat. Other board representation has not been confirmed publicly.

Sergey Levine and Chelsea Finn each hold active faculty appointments at UC Berkeley and Stanford respectively while serving as company co-founders. This raises questions about potential conflicts of interest: research conducted at their universities could have commercial implications for Physical Intelligence, and graduate students they advise may work on problems that benefit the company. Both universities have policies governing faculty entrepreneurship and intellectual property, though the specifics of these arrangements with Physical Intelligence have not been disclosed.

General-purpose robotic intelligence has obvious dual-use potential. A robot that can fold laundry can also handle materials in hazardous environments. A robot that can sort packages can be adapted for logistics in military supply chains. Physical Intelligence has not publicly discussed defense applications, but as its technology matures, regulatory and ethical questions about military use will likely arise, similar to those faced by Anduril and Shield AI.

Pi's models are compute-intensive, requiring significant GPU infrastructure to train and run. The company's reliance on NVIDIA hardware, reflected in NVIDIA's investment, creates a dependency on a single supplier's supply chain and pricing decisions. As the compute requirements for generalist robot policies grow, this dependency becomes more strategically significant.

Physical Intelligence's ownership picture carries implications for the robotics industry well beyond the company itself.

Alphabet's investment through CapitalG positions Pi as a potential component of Alphabet's broader AI and automation strategy. Alphabet also owns Waymo (autonomous vehicles) and has invested in multiple robotics initiatives. A future acquisition of Physical Intelligence by Alphabet would consolidate significant robotics AI capability under one parent, with implications for competition across industrial automation, logistics, and consumer robotics.

OpenAI's investment creates a similar dynamic. If OpenAI eventually builds or acquires robot hardware platforms, its equity stake in Physical Intelligence could facilitate deeper commercial integration or an acquisition.

Jeff Bezos's presence as an early backer, alongside Amazon Robotics' existing investments in warehouse automation, raises the possibility of a strategic relationship between Physical Intelligence and the Amazon logistics network: one of the world's largest markets for practical robotics deployment.

For users of robot systems built on Pi's technology, ownership matters because it determines who controls the foundational model that governs robot behavior, and whether that model remains open, commercially licensed, or proprietary.

Karol Hausman is the CEO and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. He previously worked as a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, where he focused on robot learning and foundation models.

No. Physical Intelligence is a privately held company with no public stock listing. No IPO has been announced. The company was founded in 2024 and remains in early commercial development.

Physical Intelligence was co-founded in 2024 by Karol Hausman (CEO), Lachy Groom (President), Sergey Levine (Chief Scientist, UC Berkeley professor), Chelsea Finn (Research Lead, Stanford professor), Brian Ichter (former Google Research), Quan Vuong, and Adnan Esmail.

The most prominent institutional investors are CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund, led the Series B), Thrive Capital (seed lead and multi-round backer), OpenAI (seed, Series A, and B), NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, T. Rowe Price, Redpoint Ventures, and Bond. Jeff Bezos led the $400 million Series A as an individual investor.

Physical Intelligence has raised approximately $1.07 billion across three known rounds, including a $600 million Series B in November 2025 at a $5.6 billion valuation. The company was reportedly in talks to raise an additional $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in March 2026, a round not yet confirmed closed as of July 2026.