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 after raising nearly $200 million in additional capital. The extension was led by 8VC and brings the company’s total Series B funding to $600 million, following a $400 million round announced in June at a $2 billion valuation.
A federal Form D filing showed $208.2 million offered, of which $198.2 million had been sold to 32 investors. The issuer is listed as Generalist AI, Inc., a Delaware company registered in 2024 and formerly called Artificial General Dexterity, Inc. Backers include Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Radical Ventures and AI researcher Fei-Fei Li.
The startup is building an AI foundation model designed to control different kinds of robots. Its newly released Gen 1.5 model can learn new tasks from video demonstrations as short as 3 to 12 seconds, and the company is working with a small group of customers to tailor the model. Generalist said its earlier GEN-1 model worked across roughly 9,000 variations of robot hands and grippers and was trained on more than half a million hours of interaction data.
Investors are betting that robotics may soon have its own 'ChatGPT moment'. However, the path remains uncertain because robots cannot train on the whole internet like large language models. Competitors include Physical Intelligence, reportedly valued at about $11 billion, Skild AI, valued at $14 billion, and Genesis AI, which was reportedly in talks to raise at a $3 billion valuation. At the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing, experts warned that embodied AI trails large language models by at least five years, with scarce real-world data as a major constraint. The broader robotics funding wave also includes Xpeng raising more than $900 million for its robotics arm at a $6.3 billion valuation.
