Generalist, a robotics startup founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Pete Florence and Andy Zeng, along with former Boston Dynamics engineer Andrew Barry, has reached a $3 billion valuation following a recent funding round led by 8VC, according to two sources familiar with the financing. The additional capital raised, totaling nearly $200 million as per a regulatory filing, extends a $400 million Series B round announced in June at a $2 billion valuation, bringing the total funding for the round to $600 million. Early backers of Generalist include 8VC, Radical Ventures, Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and AI researcher Fei-Fei Li.
Generalist is developing an AI foundation model designed to work with various robots, claiming that its newly released Gen 1.5 model enables robots to master new tasks from video demonstrations as short as 3 to 12 seconds long. The startup is currently working with a limited number of customers, using their feedback to tailor the model for specific use cases. The funding surge reflects investor confidence in the potential for robotics to experience a “ChatGPT moment,” where robots can perform general tasks without explicit training for each one. However, some venture capitalists caution that a truly general robotics model may still be years away due to the limitations in training robots compared to language models. Source