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 2024, launched its first model in late 2024, and open-sourced it in February 2025. By March 2026, it was reportedly seeking a $1 billion funding round at an $11 billion valuation. 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 five researchers 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.

Total disclosed funding exceeds $1.07 billion across three rounds. The company is reportedly in talks to raise an additional $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation as of March 2026, potentially pushing total funding above $2 billion before the company has reached its third birthday.

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

Each of the five 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: Some sources report the initial and Series A as a single combined raise of approximately $70M, while others separate them. The $400M Series A is the most consistently cited figure across reporting.

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.

Spark Capital was one of the earliest institutional backers, participating in the seed stage and the Series A. The firm has a track record in AI infrastructure and developer tools.

OpenAI participated in both the Series A and Series B. 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 participated in the initial funding 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.

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), Sergey Levine (Chief Scientist, UC Berkeley professor), Chelsea Finn (Research Lead, Stanford professor), Brian Ichter (former Google Research), and Adnan Esmail.

The most prominent institutional investors are CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund, led the Series B), Spark Capital (early backer across multiple rounds), OpenAI (Series A and B), NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, T. Rowe Price, Redpoint Ventures, and Bond. Jeff Bezos participated as an individual investor in the initial round.

Physical Intelligence has raised approximately $1.07 billion across three known rounds, including a $600 million Series B in November 2025. The company is reportedly in talks to raise an additional $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation as of March 2026.