Skild AI, a US startup that reached unicorn status before anyone ever heard of it, says it’s wiring the nervous system for a robot run future.
A year after emerging from stealth, and then maintaining near-total radio silence, the buzzy Pittsburgh-based Skild AI is pulling back the curtain on its grand ambition: To build a single AI brain that controls any robot, in any form, for any task.
As China floods its factories and streets with general-purpose machines and doles out state funding in the race toward superintelligence, Skild is betting on its single, adaptable brain to ensure the US stakes its claim as the global leader in artificial intelligence. Others aren’t so sure, warning that the US is falling behind the People’s Republic due to its obsession with software and lack of serious hardware deployment.
Skild belongs to a growing array of startups to hit unicorn status before releasing, or even announcing, a product like Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and San Francisco-based Physical Intelligence.
Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta left their jobs as professors at Carnegie Mellon University in May 2023 to launch Skild. At CMU, they studied artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer vision for a combined 25 years. Pathak also spent time as a researcher at Meta AI, while Gupta focused on deep learning and how machines perceive the world.
They aimed to build AI that lets robots of any shape do general-purpose tasks without special programming. The founders secretly recruited engineers from tech giants like Meta, NVIDIA, Tesla and top robotics labs.
Skild’s ‘One Brain’ for Multi-Form Robots
When Skild emerged from stealth in July 2024, it had just raised $300 million in Series A funding for a $1.5 billion valuation. Investors included Amazon, SoftBank, Lightspeed, and Sequoia. Despite the hype, the startup stayed under the radar, releasing minimal public information about what they’re actually building. The public got a glimpse of their work earlier this summer when CBS News paid its lab a visit during President Trump’s appearance at CMU for an AI summit.
After teasing a big reveal, Skild just unveiled its foundational AI model. Called Skild Brain, it runs across a wide range of robots, including industrial arms and manipulators, quadrupeds and, of course, humanoids. They’re entering the public sphere with another $100 million in Series B funding, led by NVIDIA and Samsung, and a staggering valuation exceeding $4.5 billion.
But there’s also intense competition.
Physical Intelligence is valued at more than $2 billion and has raised $400 million to build a master AI model that understands sensor and motion data.
Another Silicon Valley unicorn, Figure AI, is developing its own AI model called Helix. Founder Brett Adcock says the vision-language-action (VLA) model will accelerate the deployment of Figure’s humanoids into the workforce and homes. The billionaire founder just shared footage of a Helix-powered humanoid doing laundry at his home. He said the robot is acting completely autonomously.
Meanwhile the founder’s brother, Colby, has launched Scout AI, which emerged from stealth earlier this year having already secured two DoD contracts and $15 million in seed funding. It’s developing an AI model for universal control of military robots.
Other startups pushing their own visions for the future of embodied intelligence include Covariant, 1X Technologies, Sanctuary AI, and Dusty Robotics.
Skild says it’s aiming for true generalization while its competition mostly focuses on narrower platforms or task-specific systems. The startup shared a video of a diverse set of robots demonstrating human-like capabilities like climbing stairs, maintaining balance when pushed, and manipulating objects in cluttered environments. According to Skild, the tasks require advanced spatial reasoning and adaptability to real-world conditions.
“The Skild Brain’s development has been characterized by the emergence of new behaviors, as well as improvements in robustness and generalization, achieved by training on an ever-growing set of data,” the team wrote in a blog post. “Before demonstrating its latest capabilities, we would like to showcase the evolution of our omni-bodied brain, and how it has iteratively improved in generalization, robustness, and adaptability over time.”
The legged robots in the footage appear to be from the Chinese companies Unitree Robotics and Fourier. A collaborative robot is from the Belgian firm Fairino.
Skild says its so-called omni-bodied model is trained on huge amounts of data from simulations, Internet videos, and real-world experiences. Instead of copying models for language or pictures, Skild says it trains its system to truly understand actions, so they know how things move and work in real life. According to Skild, the AI brain is improving rapidly, already adapting to different form factors and new challenges.
Not everyone’s impressed.
K-Scale Founder Blasts Silicon Valley Tech Scene
Benjamin Bolte, founder of the Palo Alto-based K Scale Labs, predicted that Skild’s story would end in an acquihire, much like Microsoft’s 2024 takeover of Inflection AI, where a lofty valuation led to a talent grab rather than a working product.
“Unless there’s something much, much better in the pipeline (which seems unlikely after 2 years and $400m), I will be shocked if the ending of this story involves anything besides an Inflection-style acquihire,” he wrote on X. “If I were an engineer at Skild without founder shares, I would be sweating a bit.”
The founder has been critical of the US tech scene for lacking factory experience and focusing on software over hardware. He’s said the US should adopt China’s approach to building AI-powered hardware, which involves aggressive open sourcing, building an ecosystem, and making technical progress as quickly as possible.
“For anyone not living in Silicon Valley, you should know that, yes, Silicon Valley is asleep at the wheel,” he wrote. “Basically no one here doing robotics has ever actually made a robot or stepped foot in a factory, much less sold a consumer electronics product or deployed an AI model in a real production environment. The best funded companies have anemic hardware teams that are basically modding Chinese bots, or dumping insane amounts of money trying to cobble together expensive in-house hardware with zero direction.”
He added: “The future of this country’s robotics industry is a dozen ‘foundation model’ companies training the same set model architectures on the same Chinese robotics datasets, all burning money on GPUs to create value for Unitree, pretending that they will magically achieve cross-embodiment transfer with another $100m investment, while pushing back delivery timelines until after they can get acquihired by OpenAI or Google.”
The Chinese government is treating humanoids as a core pillar of its national AI strategy, with firms like AgiBot, UBTECH Robotics, and Shenzhen Dobot already reporting mass producing their AI robots.
K-Scale recently launched its first open-source humanoid robot, the K-Bot , which is available to order starting at $11K.
LimX Officially Releases Third-Gen Humanoid
Meanwhile in China, LimX Dynamics just officially launched its flagship humanoid robot.
The LimX Oli, known as the CL-3 during its development, stands about 165 centimeters (5’5″) tall, weighs about 55 kg (121 lbs), and boasts 31 degrees of freedom (DoF).
LimX, which is known for its agile quadrupedal and biped robots, emphasizes the robot’s modular design so it can be upgraded and adapted for future automations in places like warehouses and factories. It comes with optional grippers or dexterous hands for manipulation tasks.
Its movements are controlled by LimX’s self-developed VGM AI system. The robot is trained through reinforcement learning , and can also watch Internet videos to learn how to move and act more like a real person.
LimX’s humanoid, which is widely considered China’s answer to Atlas by Boston Dynamics, is available for pre order starting around $22K. It’s available exclusively to mainland China to begin, but plans call for global sales in the future.
For more on LimX’s robots and other humanoids to watch out for in 2025, watch this.