What Is Dyna Robotics?
Dyna Robotics is a robot foundation-model startup founded in 2024 and based in Redwood City, California. Rather than selling a consumer robot, Dyna builds the AI models that make stationary and mobile robotic arms perform useful physical tasks reliably, aiming at what the company calls a path to 'physical artificial general intelligence.'
The company's pitch mirrors a broader wave of robot foundation-model startups: general manipulation intelligence, deployed on existing hardware, is the bottleneck holding back commercial robotics, not the robot arms themselves. Dyna sells its models as production software that customers deploy on their own robotic arms rather than as a physical product you buy off a shelf.
This page covers who founded Dyna Robotics, what its DYNA-1 model actually does, how much the company has raised, and where it fits among the other robot foundation-model builders we track.
| Attribute | Dyna Robotics | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2024 | Redwood City, California |
| Founders | Lindon Gao, York Yang, Jason Ma | Gao and Yang previously built Caper AI (sold to Instacart, $350M) |
| Flagship product | DYNA-1 | Dexterous robot foundation model |
| Total funding | $144 million | $23.5M seed (March 2025) + $120M Series A (September 2025) |
| Status | Commercial deployments | Model licensed to customers running their own robotic arms |
Who Founded Dyna Robotics?
Dyna Robotics was co-founded by Lindon Gao and York Yang, the team behind Caper AI, an automated grocery checkout-cart company that Instacart acquired for roughly $350 million in 2021. Their third co-founder, Jason Ma, is a former DeepMind research scientist and was lead author on Eureka, a widely cited research paper on training robots to perform dexterous manipulation using large language model feedback.
That combination is part of Dyna's pitch to investors: Gao and Yang bring a track record of building and selling a physical-automation company, while Ma brings deep robot-learning research credibility from DeepMind. Dyna has not published extensive public detail on its broader engineering and go-to-market team beyond the three co-founders.
As with any young startup, verify current titles and team size on Dyna's own site or LinkedIn before citing them, since leadership pages change as companies scale.
What Does The DYNA-1 Model Do?
DYNA-1 is Dyna Robotics' flagship robot foundation model, unveiled in April 2025. The company describes it as the first commercial-ready robot foundation model offering fully autonomous, round-the-clock dexterity, meaning it is meant to run on production lines without a human resetting or supervising it between tasks.
In demonstrations, DYNA-1 has run a pair of stationary robotic arms on high-dexterity tasks such as folding napkins continuously for more than 24 hours with a reported 99-plus percent success rate and zero human intervention. Dyna has since introduced a newer architecture, described publicly as DYNA-2, trained on roughly one million hours of human video, which the company says outperforms the standard vision-language-action approach in real production deployments.
DYNA-1 sits in the same category as the general-purpose manipulation models covered in our embodied AI explainer, which walks through how foundation models let one AI system control different robot bodies. If you want to try dexterous manipulation learning yourself on open hardware, our LeRobot guide is the practical starting point.
- DYNA-1 launched April 2025; described by Dyna as the first commercial-ready dexterous robot foundation model.
- Demonstrated 24-hour continuous operation on tasks like napkin folding with a reported 99%+ success rate.
- DYNA-2, a newer architecture, trained on about one million hours of human video.
- Deployed on customers' existing stationary robotic arms rather than sold as a standalone robot.
Dyna Robotics Funding And Investors
Dyna Robotics has raised $144 million across two disclosed rounds. It closed a $23.5 million seed round in March 2025, then a $120 million Series A in September 2025 led by Robostrategy, CRV, and First Round Capital.
Series A participants also included NVIDIA's corporate venture arm NVentures, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung Next, and LG Technology Ventures. That mix of enterprise strategics alongside traditional VC firms signals interest from companies that could become customers or hardware partners, not just financial backers.
Dyna has said the new funding is earmarked for expanding its team, accelerating delivery of production-ready general-purpose robots powered by its foundation models, and scaling deployments across industries. As with any private company, treat the valuation and pace of future rounds as unconfirmed until Dyna or its investors disclose them.
How Dyna Robotics Fits The Robot Foundation-Model Race
Dyna is one of several venture-backed startups racing to build a general-purpose "brain" for robots rather than a specific robot body, alongside companies like Physical Intelligence and Skild AI. See our Physical Intelligence profile and Skild AI review for how those two compare on approach and funding.
Dyna's differentiator so far is its emphasis on commercial deployment speed: rather than leading with a research demo, the company has framed DYNA-1 around 24-hour unattended production use, which is the kind of proof point manufacturing and logistics customers actually care about.
For the wider landscape of companies building robot bodies these kinds of models could eventually run on, browse our robotics companies hub.
Bottom Line
Dyna Robotics is a Redwood City robot foundation-model startup founded by Caper AI's Lindon Gao and York Yang alongside former DeepMind researcher Jason Ma. Its DYNA-1 model targets commercially deployable dexterous manipulation, demonstrated with 24-hour unattended runs on stationary robotic arms, and the company has raised $144 million to date, including a $120 million Series A from investors like NVIDIA, Amazon, and Salesforce Ventures. It remains a private, early-stage company selling AI models rather than a robot product, so treat any specific deployment or performance claim as Dyna's own until independently verified.
Read our embodied AI explainer to see how models like DYNA-1 fit the broader shift toward general-purpose robot intelligence, and compare Dyna's approach with Physical Intelligence and Skild AI in our robotics companies hub.
FAQs
What is Dyna Robotics?
Dyna Robotics is a Redwood City, California startup founded in 2024 that builds robot foundation models, AI systems that let robotic arms perform dexterous manipulation tasks autonomously in commercial settings.
Who founded Dyna Robotics?
Dyna Robotics was founded by Lindon Gao and York Yang, who previously built Caper AI (sold to Instacart for about $350 million), and Jason Ma, a former DeepMind research scientist and lead author on the Eureka robot-manipulation research paper.
What is DYNA-1?
DYNA-1 is Dyna Robotics' flagship robot foundation model, launched in April 2025. The company describes it as the first commercial-ready dexterous robot foundation model, demonstrated running stationary robotic arms on tasks like napkin folding for 24 hours with a reported 99%+ success rate and no human intervention.
How much funding has Dyna Robotics raised?
Dyna Robotics has raised $144 million total: a $23.5 million seed round in March 2025 and a $120 million Series A in September 2025 led by Robostrategy, CRV, and First Round Capital, with participation from NVIDIA's NVentures, Amazon, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung Next, and LG Technology Ventures.
Does Dyna Robotics sell its own robot?
No. Dyna Robotics licenses its foundation models, like DYNA-1, to run on customers' existing robotic arms rather than manufacturing and selling a robot of its own.