Skild AI, a Pittsburgh company developing a general-purpose AI model for robots, raised about $1.4bn in a Series C round led by SoftBank, it announced on 14 January 2026. The company said the round valued it at more than $14bn.
New investors included NVentures, NVIDIA's venture arm, entities administered by Macquarie Capital, and Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions. Strategic investors LG, Schneider Electric, CommonSpirit and Salesforce Ventures also joined, along with Disruptive, 1789 Capital and IQT. Existing backers Lightspeed, Felicis, Coatue and Sequoia Capital invested again. The Bridge and Arise News also named Samsung among the strategic investors.
The valuation was more than triple the $4.5bn the company reached in its Series B, The Bridge reported.
“You need real-world data to build a general robotic brain, and that's been our focus from day one.”Deepak Pathak, Co-founder and CEO, Skild AI
What Skild AI does
Skild AI was founded in 2023 by Deepak Pathak, its chief executive, and Abhinav Gupta, its president, according to Arise News. Its main product is the Skild Brain, which the company describes as a single robotics foundation model that can control different machines, including four-legged robots, humanoids, tabletop arms and mobile manipulators.
The company said its robots are deployed in security, construction, delivery, data centres, warehouses and factory assembly. Arise News reported that Skild works with more than eight customers, including one that deployed a Skild-powered service robot at New York's LaGuardia Airport to monitor air quality, and that it has more than 100 employees.
Skild said its revenue grew from zero to about $30m within a few months in 2025. Pathak said building a general robot brain depends on data from the physical world. "You need real-world data to build a general robotic brain, and that's been our focus from day one," he said, according to Arise News.
The Bridge reported that the Skild Brain is built on a design approach the company calls Omnibody and is pre-trained on human videos from the internet and on physical simulations. Arise News said the model runs on standard GPUs and that LG CNS is working with Skild on humanoid robots.
What the money is for
The company said it will use the funds to scale each of its training data sources: simulation, internet videos, teleoperation and real-world deployments. It also plans to expand research into model architectures, algorithms and data collection, and to focus on deployments that produce economic value.
The Bridge reported that Skild aims to scale model training, widen deployment and eventually bring robots into consumer homes.
The funding so far
SoftBank also led Skild's $500m Series B in May 2025, which valued the company at $4.5bn, according to Pittsburgh Startup News. Reports differ on the company's total funding: The Bridge put it at more than $1.83bn, Arise News at about $2bn and Pittsburgh Startup News at more than $2.1bn.
Pittsburgh Startup News reported that the deal was first reported in December 2025, before it was formally announced in January.
Pittsburgh Startup News described the company as based in the city's East Liberty neighbourhood.
Company website: skild.ai