Generalist AI raises $400 million to scale embodied foundation models for robots

Generalist AI, founded in 2024, announced $400 million in new funding led by Radical Ventures, bringing total funding to more than half a billion dollars. Investors include 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Norwest, NVIDIA's NVentures, Boldstart Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and NFDG, along with angel investors Eric Yuan, Bin Lin, Fei-Fei Li, and Naval Ravikant.

The company released GEN-1 in April, a general-purpose AI model for robotics that improves average success rates to 99% on tasks where previous models achieved 64%, completes dexterous tasks roughly three times faster than current approaches, and requires only one hour of robot data for these results, according to the company.

Generalist plans to use the funding to accelerate building physical artificial general intelligence, scale its physical data engine, and expand compute and training infrastructure. The company asserted that a data flywheel has begun—where scaling robot learning creates better models that do more useful physical work, and data from real businesses drives the next generation of more capable models.