Jeff Bezos and OpenAI Invest in Physical Intelligence, Valuing Startup at $2.4 Billion

Physical Intelligence, a San Francisco-based robotics startup, has secured a remarkable $400 million in funding, bringing its post-money valuation to an impressive $2.4 billion, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC.

As confirmed by a company spokesperson, leading investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital, and Lux Capital. Bond Capital joined this round, while Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are critical supporters on the company’s website.

This latest valuation marks a significant leap—about six times higher than its March seed round, which reportedly closed at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. The Physical Intelligence team boasts talent from industry leaders, with former employees from Tesla, Google DeepMind, and X.

With a mission to “bring general-purpose AI into the physical world,” Physical Intelligence is pioneering the development of large-scale AI models and algorithms to power versatile robotics. Over the last eight months, the startup has intensively developed a “general-purpose” AI model for robotics, aiming to lay the groundwork for artificial general Intelligence (AGI). AGI represents AI technology that matches or surpasses human cognitive abilities across various tasks.

This announcement follows closely after OpenAI’s recent introduction of a search function within its popular ChatGPT, positioning OpenAI to better compete with major search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Perplexity. Last month, OpenAI closed a significant funding round with a staggering valuation of $157 billion.

Physical Intelligence envisions a future where users can “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just as they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” as a company blog post outlines. In illustrative case studies, Physical Intelligence highlights how its technology could enable robots to perform everyday tasks like doing laundry, bussing tables, or assembling boxes.