Skild AI Grabs $1.4B Valuation to Build Universal Robot Brain Challenging OpenAI’s Figure Bet
- ByStartupStory | January 15, 2026
Skild AI, the robotics unicorn developing a foundational model to power every robot from warehouse pickers to humanoid companions, has raised a massive funding round valuing the company at $1.4 billion.
The San Francisco startup aims to create the “universal brain” enabling machines to generalize across tasks without task-specific training – vacuuming one morning, folding laundry by afternoon, navigating unfamiliar kitchens by evening. Unlike OpenAI’s hardware-heavy Figure investment, Skild focuses purely on software that slots into existing robotic arms and mobility platforms.
Co-founders Ashish Jain and Aditya Dhall engineered Skild’s multimodal model to process vision, touch, audio, and proprioception simultaneously, generating fluid motion sequences that adapt to novel objects and environments. Their approach promises 10x faster deployment than reinforcement learning while matching human dexterity through massive datasets of human-robot interaction.
The capital accelerates data center expansion for exabyte-scale training and partnerships with robotic OEMs needing plug-and-play intelligence. Skild eyes Boston Dynamics Spot, Amazon Digit, and Chinese humanoid manufacturers as first customers, targeting factory automation where labor shortages cost manufacturers $50 billion annually.
Skild AI proves robotics leaps forward through software abstraction. When every robotic arm downloads the same universal brain and instantly learns your warehouse layout, $1.4 billion becomes the ante for controlling tomorrow’s $10 trillion robot economy. OpenAI builds bodies; Skild builds minds that make them useful.
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