FieldAI, a robotics startup backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and others, raised $405 million in recent funding rounds as the California-based company aims to deploy its “software brain” in a variety of robots across diverse environments.
The investment, which came in consecutive Series A and A1 rounds, values the 2-year-old startup at $2 billion according to reports by Axios and CNBC on Wednesday.
Gates Frontier, an investment arm of the Microsoft co-founder, previously backed FieldAI. Bezos Expeditions, the investment office for the Amazon founder, joined the latest oversubscribed round along with NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), BHP Ventures, Canaan Partners, Emerson Collective, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Prysm, Temasek, and others.
FieldAI builds the intelligence that powers humanoid robots and other embodiments, including quadrupeds, wheeled robots and passenger-scale vehicles. The company says its platform — called Field Foundation Models — differs from conventional vision or language models retrofitted for robotics. FFMs are designed to grapple with uncertainty, risk, and the physical constraints of the real world and safely navigate and work in dynamic, unstructured environments without prior maps, GPS, or predefined paths.
FieldAI attaches its system to third-party robot hardware, and they can work autonomously across industries including construction, energy, manufacturing, urban delivery and inspection.
The acceleration of robotics is evident at companies like Amazon, where the tech giant has deployed more than 1 million robots across its fulfillment network, with the goal of making warehouse work safer and more efficient.
Amazon has invested in Salem, Ore.-based Agility Robotics through its Industrial Innovation Fund, a billion-dollar venture capital fund that backs different forms of supply chain technology. Agility — known for its Digit bipedal humanoid warehouse robot, was raising $400 million in new funding earlier this year, according to reports.
Last year, Amazon hired three of the founders from Covariant, a Bay Area startup that develops AI for advanced warehouse robotics systems.
Bezos Expeditions previously joined a $400 million funding round for Physical Intelligence, a robot startup in San Francisco that is also backed by OpenAI.
FieldAI is led by veterans in robotic AI from DeepMind, Google Brain, Tesla Autopilot, NASA JPL, SpaceX, Zoox, Cruise, Amazon, DARPA, TRI, and others.
“With a deep understanding of the resilience and robustness required to deploy robotic AI in complex real-world conditions, we have taken a fundamentally different approach,” founder and CEO Ali Agha said in a statement. “Rather than attempting to shoehorn large language and vision models into robotics — only to address their hallucinations and limitations as an afterthought — we have designed intrinsically risk-aware architectures from the ground up.”
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