The History of Skild AI

01Founding

Skild AI was founded in 2023 in Pittsburgh by Deepak Pathak (CEO) and Abhinav Gupta (President) — some sources specify May 2023. Both are Carnegie Mellon faculty with overlapping research careers: Pathak, the Raj Reddy Associate Professor in CMU's School of Computer Science, holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and previously co-founded facial-recognition startup VisageMap (acquired by FaceFirst in 2015); his 2017 paper on "curiosity-driven exploration" in robot learning has been cited more than 4,000 times. Gupta, an associate professor at CMU's Robotics Institute, holds a PhD from the University of Maryland and was a founding member of Meta's Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab, where the two first worked together before founding the company. Between them, Skild's founders and press materials describe roughly 25 years of combined AI and robotics research experience.

No named third co-founder appears in company materials; early hires were drawn from Amazon, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla. Skild's Series A round, in July 2024, was the first outside capital disclosed for the company — no separate seed-round amount has been publicly reported, and Carnegie Mellon University itself is listed among the Series A's investors.

02Funding

Skild's Series A, announced July 9, 2024, raised $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos, with Carnegie Mellon University, Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund, and the Alexa Fund also participating. A Series B followed roughly a year later — reported dates and figures vary somewhat by source, with most coverage placing it around mid-2025 at a $500 million round size and a valuation reported as either $4.5 billion or $4.7 billion depending on the outlet — led by a $100 million SoftBank commitment, with Nvidia and Samsung contributing a combined $35 million alongside other strategic investors including LG, Schneider Electric, and Salesforce Ventures.

Skild's Series C, announced January 14, 2026, raised $1.4 billion at a valuation of more than $14 billion — roughly tripling the Series B valuation in about seven months — led again by SoftBank, with Nvidia's venture arm, Macquarie Group, Jeff Bezos, and returning investors Lightspeed, Sequoia, and Coatue all participating. Crunchbase News's tally after that round put Skild's total raised at "over $1.83 billion" — a figure that, if the individual round amounts above are added directly ($300M + $500M + $1.4B ≈ $2.2B), suggests some rounds may have closed in tranches not fully reflected in every published tally; readers should treat cumulative-funding figures for Skild as approximate rather than precisely reconciled across sources.

03One model, many robot bodies

Skild's product, Skild Brain, is pitched explicitly as "omni-bodied" — a single model trained, per the company's own September 2025 blog post, across 100,000 simulated robot configurations, demonstrated on quadrupeds, wheeled quadrupeds, humanoid variants, tabletop manipulator arms, and bimanual mobile robots. Skild's own demos emphasize recovery behaviors on hardware excluded from training data entirely, to test generalization rather than memorization: recovering from induced instability within three attempts, compensating for a simulated lost limb within seconds, and switching from a wheeled to a legged gait when a wheel jams.

The company's technical partnership with Nvidia runs deep — Skild trains using Nvidia's Isaac Lab simulation platform and Cosmos Transfer data-augmentation tools, and an Nvidia case study credits the approach with reaching 60-80% task performance within hours of new-task data collection, at a claimed 10x reduction in total cost of ownership versus conventionally engineered robot systems. CEO Pathak has framed the shift in blunt terms: "Learning by experience, and not pre-programming, is the step change that has happened in robotics."

04Commercialization first: revenue, and the Zebra acquisition

Where Physical Intelligence — Skild's closest rival on the same "universal robot brain" thesis — has been candid about not having a revenue plan, Skild has leaned the opposite direction. The company and Crunchbase News both describe revenue growing from zero to roughly $30 million within a few months during 2025, attributed to "multiple customers," though no individual customer names have been publicly disclosed; deployment sectors named in coverage include security, facility inspection, warehouses, and manufacturing.

In April 2026, Skild acquired Zebra Technologies' robotics-automation business, including its Symmetry Fulfillment warehouse-orchestration software — deal terms weren't disclosed, but the acquisition gives Skild an existing fleet-management platform to pair with Skild Brain for warehouse-scale deployment, a concrete commercialization move that has no clear parallel yet at Physical Intelligence.

05Discrepancies in disclosure

Skild's rapid fundraising has drawn some press scrutiny over how its numbers are disclosed. An investigative piece by the outlet technical.ly found that, ahead of the Series C, PitchBook showed Skild having raised $814 million total, while the only SEC Form D filing findable under the company's name — for a special-purpose vehicle — showed just over $1 million raised in May 2025, a stark enough gap between third-party fundraising trackers and public federal filings to note explicitly rather than assume away.

Headcount estimates for Skild are similarly inconsistent across sources and dates: reported figures include roughly 24 employees (Contrary Research), 25 open job listings across four cities (technical.ly), 50 total employees (PitchBook), and 64 employees as of March 2026 (Tracxn, citing 63% year-over-year growth) — a wide enough spread that any single number should be read as one tracker's estimate, not a confirmed company figure. Skild has also opened a San Francisco Bay Area office while maintaining that Pittsburgh remains its headquarters.

06FAQ

07Sources