Skild teams with ABB & UR
Skild AI announced partnerships with ABB Robotics and Universal Robots to deploy the 'Skild Brain' across factory lines, aiming to create a massive data flywheel for physical AI and accelerate general‑purpose robotics in manufacturing. The collaboration emphasizes hardware-agnostic intelligence that can scale across different robot arms and facilities. (x.com)
Skild closed a near‑$1.4 billion funding round led by SoftBank in January 2026 that the company said values it at just over $14 billion. (businesswire.com) Reuters reported on March 16, 2026 that Skild’s model will be deployed on Foxconn’s Houston assembly lines that produce NVIDIA Blackwell GPU server racks, calling it an early commercial use of “generalized physical AI.” (msn.com) The January financing named strategic backers beyond SoftBank, including NVIDIA’s venture arm and Jeff Bezos via Bezos Expeditions, signaling deep cloud/GPU and logistics capital behind Skild’s push. (businesswire.com) Skild’s own materials label the system an “omni‑bodied” robotics foundation model and describe a two‑stage pipeline: large‑scale simulation pretraining using NVIDIA Isaac Sim followed by fine‑tuning on targeted real‑world robot data. (skild.ai) Industry writeups and Skild briefings say the company’s training regimen amounts to “thousands of years” of virtual operational experience in simulation before any physical rollout, which Skild positions as the source of its cross‑deployment learning. (roboticsobserver.com) Company and trade notices indicate the Skild stack is being integrated with Teradyne‑owned Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) and will be used to control dual‑arm, high‑precision assembly cells on NVIDIA Blackwell production lines at Foxconn. (via.ritzau.dk)
