Physical Intelligence
Foundation model
San Francisco robot foundation-model lab (pi) building one generalist robot brain (pi0-series VLAs) that controls any robot.
Physical Intelligence (pi) develops general-purpose robot foundation models - vision-language-action (VLA) policies such as pi0 and successors - that let many robot bodies perform diverse physical tasks. Rather than per-task automation, pi trains a single generalist brain on large-scale multi-robot data, licenses the models to robot and industrial partners, and publishes research (for example, open-sourcing pi0). The company was founded in 2024 by veterans of Google DeepMind's robotics group and leading academic robot-learning labs, and is backed by Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital and Alphabet's CapitalG. (Company-reported facts.)
Research mapping
Physical AI / Sim-to-Real, Digital Twins & Validation (L9) / Foundation model
Evidence boundary
Original analysis and independent corroboration remain under development. Commercial scale and durable technical advantage remain under review.
What makes it defensible
A single cross-embodiment generalist robot foundation model trained on large multi-robot data, from the team behind Google's RT-1/RT-2 - a scale-and-talent moat in robot learning.
Position in the stack: Robot foundation-model layer: supplies the AI 'brain' that robot makers and operators build on, rather than building the robot hardware itself.
Who buys it
Founding team
Karol Hausman — Co-founder & CEO — Former Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind robotics; adjunct professor at Stanford.
Sergey Levine — Co-founder & Chief Scientist — Professor at UC Berkeley; robot learning and reinforcement learning researcher.
Chelsea Finn — Co-founder & Chief Scientist — Professor at Stanford; meta-learning and robot learning researcher.
Brian Ichter — Co-founder — Former Google DeepMind/Brain robotics researcher (RT-1/RT-2 lineage).
Lachy Groom — Co-founder — Investor and former Stripe executive.
SourceFinancing detail
- Last round
- Series B
Investors: CapitalG, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Bond, Redpoint Ventures
Mapped funds and investors
Direct relationships supported by published evidence.
Reported holdings as-of
No sourced relationships mapped yet.
Disclosed investment history
No sourced relationships mapped yet.
Showing up to four relationships in each group. ETF weights describe the fund’s portfolio, not ownership of this company. Private investment history does not establish current ownership.
Evidence & media
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Physical Intelligence: Silicon Valley’s buzziest robot brains
What this source supports: Profile of Pi as a leading robot-brain company; VLA foundation models with a data-collection and eval loop
What it does not establish: Profile; no economics, revenue, or named customers
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Physical Intelligence funding rounds - Series C $1.05B at $11.19B post-money (Forge Global secondary-market record, page updated 2026-09-13)
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Physical Intelligence Hits $11B Valuation In $1B Round (Founders Fund led)
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Announcing our API beta - Frontier Models for Every Robot (pi.website)
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Physical Intelligence Opens Pi API Beta for Robot Model Training and Deployment
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Timeline
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Product
Physical Intelligence opens the Pi API beta - upload data, managed fine-tuning, hosted inference gateway for the pi-series models
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Financing
Physical Intelligence closed a $1.05B Series C on May 21, 2026 at an $11.19B post-money valuation (Founders Fund led; Lightspeed, Lux, Thrive)
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Financing
Series B — $1,070,000,000 total disclosed
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