What Is Skild AI?
Skild AI is a robotics AI company founded in 2023 by Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, who both left tenured research positions at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute to start the company. It is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with an additional office in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Rather than building its own robot hardware, Skild AI builds the AI layer that hardware makers plug into. The company's pitch to investors and manufacturers is that most humanoid and industrial robot programs are bottlenecked by intelligence, not mechanics, and that a single shared foundation model can be licensed across many robot bodies the way cloud compute is licensed across many applications.
This page covers what Skild AI actually builds, who runs it, how it has been funded, and how it fits into the broader wave of robot foundation-model startups.
| Attribute | Skild AI | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2023 | Pittsburgh, PA |
| Founders | Deepak Pathak (CEO), Abhinav Gupta (President) | Both ex-CMU Robotics Institute |
| Flagship product | Skild Brain | Hardware-agnostic robot foundation model |
| Series C | $1.4B, January 2026 | Led by SoftBank; Nvidia, Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric, Salesforce Ventures also participated |
| Valuation | $14B+ | Up from about $4.5–4.7B roughly seven months earlier |
| Business model | Licenses the model via cloud API | Does not sell its own robot hardware |
What Is Skild Brain?
Skild Brain is the company's flagship model: a single AI system designed to control many different robot bodies — quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms, and mobile manipulators — without being rebuilt from scratch for each one. Skild describes it as 'omni-bodied,' meaning the same underlying model generalizes across robot form factors rather than requiring bespoke retraining per platform.
The commercial pitch is that a hardware manufacturer can focus on the mechanical side of a robot and license Skild Brain as the intelligence layer, paying for robot capability the way a company pays for cloud infrastructure rather than building an in-house AI team.
This is the same "foundation model for robots" thesis behind several other well-funded labs; for background on the category, see our embodied AI explainer.
Who Founded Skild AI?
Deepak Pathak is Skild AI's CEO. He completed his PhD at UC Berkeley, where his research on adaptive robot learning has been cited tens of thousands of times, and held a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon before co-founding Skild.
Abhinav Gupta is Skild AI's President. He was a tenured professor at CMU's Robotics Institute and a founding member of Meta's FAIR Robotics research group before joining Pathak to start the company.
Both founders left tenured academic positions to commercialize research they had already been pursuing at CMU, which is part of why the company's funding rounds have moved so quickly — investors were backing an established research track record, not a first-time team.
Skild AI Funding And Valuation
Skild AI closed a $1.4 billion Series C in January 2026, led by SoftBank Group with participation from Nvidia's NVentures, Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric, and Salesforce Ventures. The round valued the company above $14 billion, more than triple the roughly $4.5 billion valuation it held about seven months earlier.
Including this round, reported total funding across three rounds in about eighteen months exceeds $2 billion, making Skild AI one of the best-capitalized robotics-AI startups in the world and putting its valuation in the same range as some of the most closely watched humanoid and foundation-model companies.
As with any private valuation, the $14B figure reflects what this specific investor group agreed to pay for its stake, not a public market price — Skild AI is privately held and has no publicly traded stock.
How Skild AI Fits The Robot Foundation-Model Race
Skild AI is one of several well-funded players betting that the winning strategy in robotics is a shared, general-purpose model rather than a robot built and trained end-to-end by a single hardware company. Its bet is closer to how large language models became a licensed layer under many products, applied instead to physical control.
For the companies actually building the robot bodies this kind of model could run on, see our robotics companies hub and our humanoid robot companies roundup. Because Skild AI is US-based, it also fits our American robots overview.
The open question for any foundation-model approach, Skild AI included, is the same one facing the whole category: how well a general model actually performs on a specific customer's hardware and task compared with a narrower, purpose-built system, and how that performance holds up outside a controlled demo.
Bottom Line
Skild AI is a Pittsburgh startup founded by ex-CMU professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, building Skild Brain, a hardware-agnostic foundation model meant to run many different robot bodies. It raised a $1.4 billion Series C in January 2026 led by SoftBank, with Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and others participating, valuing the company above $14 billion. It licenses its model rather than selling its own robot, and is privately held with no public stock.
See the robots this kind of model could eventually power in our robotics companies hub and humanoid robot companies roundup, and read the embodied AI explainer for the category Skild Brain competes in.
FAQs
What is Skild AI?
Skild AI is a Pittsburgh-based robotics AI startup, founded in 2023 by former Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, that builds Skild Brain, a hardware-agnostic foundation model for controlling robots.
What is Skild Brain?
Skild Brain is Skild AI's flagship 'omni-bodied' AI model, designed to control many different robot form factors — quadrupeds, humanoids, arms, and mobile manipulators — without being retrained separately for each one.
How much funding has Skild AI raised?
Skild AI raised a $1.4 billion Series C in January 2026 led by SoftBank, with Nvidia, Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric, and Salesforce Ventures participating. Reported total funding across its rounds exceeds $2 billion.
What is Skild AI's valuation?
The January 2026 Series C valued Skild AI above $14 billion, up from roughly $4.5 billion about seven months earlier.
Is Skild AI publicly traded?
No. Skild AI is a privately held company. It has no publicly traded stock, so any figure presented as a 'Skild AI stock price' is not a real, tradeable listing.