RoboForce, a physical AI robotics company founded in 2023, announced on 16 March 2026 that it had raised $52m in an oversubscribed Series A round led by YZi Labs. The new money brings the company's total funding to $67m, according to SiliconANGLE and Robotics 24/7.
Jerry Yang, co-founder and former chief executive of Yahoo, took part in the round. Robotics 24/7 said he joined existing investors that include Nobel laureate economist Myron Scholes, Gary Rieschel, founding partner of Qiming Venture Partners, and Carnegie Mellon University, among others. No valuation was disclosed.
The company had previously secured $10m in early-stage funding in January 2025, Robotics 24/7 reported.
“Our mission is to elevate humans into safer, higher-value roles while robots take on the most demanding industrial tasks.”Leo Ma, founder and CEO, RoboForce
What RoboForce builds
RoboForce calls its product robo-labor: robots designed to do physically demanding, repetitive and safety-critical industrial work that still relies on scarce human labour. SiliconANGLE listed possible uses including utility-scale solar installations, data centre infrastructure maintenance, mining, shipping yards, manufacturing facilities and warehouse logistics.
The company describes a physical AI stack that combines robot hardware, machine-learning models and simulation. Its robot foundation model is trained on a mix of real-world operating data and synthetic data from simulation. Deployed robots send telemetry and task-performance data back into training to improve motion control, object handling and task sequencing, SiliconANGLE reported.
RoboForce said it is building the model and robotics stack in collaboration with Nvidia, using Jetson Thor processors at the edge and the Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab frameworks for simulation and robot learning.
What the money is for
RoboForce said the funding will accelerate its next-generation robot foundation model, scale up general-purpose physical AI robots and drive manufacturing readiness for commercial deployment. Robotics 24/7 set out three pillars: the foundation model and a data flywheel combining fleet data with high-fidelity simulation; scaling manufacturing and the robot platform, including ramping production and strengthening the supply chain; and commercialisation, moving active pilot programmes toward production deployments and recurring revenue.
The company said industrial operators face a growing gap between the work that must be done and the labour available, which slows project timelines and raises safety risks.
Robotics 24/7 added that the company wants to build a continuous data flywheel that speeds up policy learning and allows reliable, scalable deployment in complex industrial environments, with NVIDIA Cosmos used for synthetic data generation and NVIDIA OSMO for cloud-to-edge orchestration.
The founder's pitch
Founder and chief executive Leo Ma said robo-labor is essential for work that is dull, dirty and dangerous. He said the problem centres on human workers' availability, cost and safety, and affects most critical industrial sectors, and that the mission is to move people into safer, higher-value roles while robots take on the most demanding tasks.
RoboForce's website says it was founded in 2023 by experts from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, Amazon Robotics, Google, Waymo and Cruise. The sources reviewed did not state the company's headquarters city, headcount or revenue. SiliconANGLE and Robotics 24/7 both described the robots as aimed at hazardous or hard-to-staff industrial settings rather than consumer use.
Company website: roboforce.ai