US Robot AI Firm Physical Intelligence Negotiates $1 Billion Funding Round at $20 Billion Valuation
US embodied AI startup Physical Intelligence is negotiating a funding round of at least $1 billion, with a post-money valuation expected to reach approximately $20 billion. Despite having zero revenue and no mass-produced hardware, its strategy for a universal robot foundation model has attracted top-tier capital including Jeff Bezos and Sequoia, rising to about 3.6 times its valuation one year ago.
According to QbitAI, US-based robotics AI startup Physical Intelligence (PI) is negotiating a new funding round aiming to raise at least $1 billion, with an expected post-money valuation of approximately $20 billion. Existing investors Avenir and Lux Capital are considering leading the round. If completed, PI's valuation would nearly double from earlier this year's $11.5 billion, compared to just $5.6 billion in November last year.
Notably, PI has generated no commercial revenue to date and does not manufacture its own robots. Its core positioning is developing a universal robot foundation model (VLA) capable of adapting to various third-party hardware, rather than building hardware itself. The founding team includes top scholars such as Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, and Chelsea Finn from Google DeepMind, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley.
Investors are betting on its potential in physical-world foundation models. PI recently launched a beta API for its robot foundation model, offering fine-tuning and inference services to external developers, marking a shift from closed demos to an open ecosystem. This progress has fueled investor enthusiasm, positioning PI as the "OpenAI of embodied brains."
However, competition in the sector is intensifying. Figure AI has reached a $39 billion valuation, while Skild AI is valued at $14 billion after surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue. PI sticks to a pure-software path, avoiding heavy asset manufacturing, but deployment in the physical world remains extremely difficult, with errors carrying higher costs than in the digital realm. PI officially warns that real-world robotic applications require dedicating full company resources to conquer each niche domain.