Skild AI inks big automation pact
Skild AI announced a partnership with ABB Robotics, Universal Robots, and NVIDIA to deploy 'Skild Brain' across factory lines—creating a data flywheel for physical AI that targets the human‑capital bottleneck in automation. The collaboration pairs industrial robot OEMs with a software brain, accelerating end‑to‑end deployment and on‑device learning in manufacturing. (x.com)
Skild closed a $1.4 billion Series C on January 14, 2026, a round led by SoftBank that the company says pushed its valuation above $14 billion. (skild.ai) Companies said the first commercial line deployments will run at Foxconn’s Houston plant where Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU server racks are assembled, a setup Reuters described as one of the earliest real-world uses of generalized physical AI. (money.usnews.com) Skild describes the Skild Brain as being pretrained in large-scale simulation to “accumulate thousands of years” of virtual operational experience, followed by fine-tuning on targeted real-robot data and on-device learning for adaptation. (roboticsobserver.com) CEO Deepak Pathak told reporters that integrating with OEMs that already have “hundreds of thousands” of deployed robots provides a faster route to scale and is intended to establish the operational data flywheel Skild needs. (communicationstoday.co.in) SoftBank agreed in October 2025 to buy ABB’s robotics business for about $5.375 billion, a transaction expected to close in mid‑to‑late 2026 that would bring ABB Robotics further inside SoftBank’s industrial‑AI ecosystem. (group.softbank) The March announcement specifically names Teradyne’s Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots as integration partners for cobots and mobile platforms, signaling pushes into both collaborative and intralogistics markets. (itnewsonline.com) Skild was founded in 2023 by Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, positioning the startup as a well‑funded software layer aimed at embedding foundation models across existing robot fleets. (skild.ai)
