Generalist AI raises $400 million to advance foundation models for robotics, reaching $2 billion valuation

Generalist AI closed a funding round valuing the company at approximately $2 billion, bringing total capital raised to more than $500 million. The round was led by Radical Ventures and included participation from 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Norwest, and existing investors including Nvidia's NVentures, Boldstart Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and NFDG. New angel investors include Fei-Fei Li, Xiaomi co-founder Bin Lin, and Naval Ravikant.

The company released GEN-1 model in April, which demonstrated 99 percent reliability across dexterous manipulation tasks, executed tasks up to three times faster than previous state-of-the-art systems, and showed ability to learn new physical skills and adapt to changing conditions. Generalist AI previously introduced GEN-0 in November, demonstrating scaling laws in robotics by showing larger models trained on increasing amounts of real-world data could produce more capable robotic systems.

The capital will be used to expand robot-learning models, physical data collection infrastructure, computing resources, and commercial deployments. The company is building foundation models (reusable AI systems that work across multiple types) for robotics that can operate across multiple robot types and environments rather than being limited to a single machine or task.