Skild AI CEO Details 'One Brain for Every Robot' Strategy
Skild AI's CEO, Deepak Pathak, outlined the company's strategy to build a single, general-purpose AI "brain" for all robots. He identified reliable physical interaction as the most difficult challenge in robotics. Skild AI is using large-scale data collection and simulation to create an adaptable software platform that can be deployed across different hardware and environments, from warehouses to city streets.
Skild AI's recent $1.4 billion Series C funding round, led by SoftBank Group with participation from NVIDIA's venture arm and Jeff Bezos, catapulted its valuation to over $14 billion. This capital infusion builds on a total of $1.81B raised since its founding in 2023, with early backing from powerhouse VCs like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. CEO Deepak Pathak is not just a founder but also the Raj Reddy Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, a hub for robotics research. His academic work pioneers curiosity-driven learning, developing AI that can learn in environments with sparse or no rewards, a foundational concept for creating general-purpose robots. The company's core technology, the "Skild Brain," is an "omni-bodied" foundation model, meaning it's designed to operate any robot—from humanoids to quadrupeds—without being trained on that specific hardware. It uses a hierarchical architecture, where a high-level policy decides on a goal and a low-level policy executes the precise motor controls, learning from massive-scale simulations and human videos to overcome the real-world data collection bottleneck. This "one brain" approach puts Skild in direct competition with other heavily-funded startups aiming to build general-purpose AI for robotics, such as Physical Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, and Figure AI. The surge in investment across these companies signals a broader VC trend toward foundational AI platforms for physical automation, with investors awarding premium valuations to AI-native robotics companies. While Skild AI pushes the frontier of general intelligence, the Turkish robotics ecosystem is maturing in specific industrial applications. Ankara-based Milvus Robotics, for example, develops autonomous mobile robots for warehouses and secured a $4.5 million investment to
