Skild AI
"General Purpose Robotic Intelligence"
Pittsburgh AI company building the Skild Brain, a general-purpose foundation model for controlling any robot embodiment.
Skild AI is an artificial intelligence company founded in 2023 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was co-founded by Deepak Pathak (CEO) and Abhinav Gupta (President), both former professors at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Deepak Pathak is widely known for his 2017 research on curiosity-driven exploration in reinforcement learning, and both founders conducted foundational work in robot learning at CMU and Meta FAIR before launching Skild.
The company's flagship product is the Skild Brain, described as the industry's first unified robotics foundation model. Unlike conventional robot-control systems that are trained for specific hardware and task configurations, the Skild Brain is designed to be omni-bodied — capable of controlling diverse robot types including quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop robotic arms, and mobile manipulators without requiring prior knowledge of the robot's exact physical configuration.
The Skild Brain employs a hierarchical control architecture. A high-level policy reasons about broad goals such as navigate to shelf and grasp box, while a low-level policy translates those intentions into precise joint-level control commands executed in milliseconds. The model supports in-context learning, enabling adaptation to new robots or environments in real time without retraining. It has demonstrated generalization across manipulation, locomotion, and navigation tasks, including stair climbing, recovery from physical perturbation, and dexterous object manipulation in cluttered scenes.
The model is pre-trained on trillions of synthetic episodes generated in physics-based simulation — leveraging NVIDIA's simulation and AI platforms — as well as millions of real-world video frames sourced from publicly available human activity data. This approach addresses the data-scarcity problem that limits most robot-learning systems. Fine-tuning is performed on targeted real-robot deployments from Skild and its partners.
Skild delivers the Skild Brain through a cloud API platform that allows robotics developers and manufacturers to integrate general-purpose intelligence into their systems without managing low-level model complexity. The company operates a B2B software-as-a-service model and reported approximately USD 30 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-2025.
Funding milestones include a USD 300 million Series A (July 2024, valuation USD 1.5 billion), a USD 500 million Series B (May 2025, valuation USD 4.7 billion), and a Series C of approximately USD 1.4 billion co-led by SoftBank and NVIDIA that pushed the company's valuation above USD 14 billion. Skild AI has partnerships with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for model training infrastructure and with NVIDIA for simulation and inference acceleration.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Skild Brain
- Model: Skild Brain
- Launch Year: 2024
General-purpose robotics foundation model delivering omni-bodied control across quadrupeds, humanoids, arms, and mobile manipulators via cloud API.
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Contact Skild AI
WEBSITE
https://www.skild.ai/HEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2023
Primary Role
Software/Algorithm
Company Size
-
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
-
Funding Total
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