Jeff Bezos-backed Physical Intelligence raises $600M to improve its AI robot brains – News

Robotics software startup Physical Intelligence has reportedly closed on a fresh, $600 million round of funding that brings its valuation to a lofty $5.6 billion.

The company has not officially disclosed the latest round, but reports by The Information and Bloomberg cited undisclosed sources who are familiar with the matter on the details. Those sources said CapitalG, an independent growth fund operated by Alphabet Inc., led the round, with existing investors Lux Capital, Thrive Capital and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos all returning to throw more capital at the startup. New investors Index Ventures and T. Rowe Price also participated in the round, the sources said.

The startup was founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers and academics from Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. It’s developing artificial intelligence algorithms that can act as the “brains” of robots. The company, which is led by Chief Executive Karol Hausman, says it’s building a “general intelligence” system that will eventually be able to power any kind of robot for any kind of application.

Robotics AI is a completely different kettle of fish from AI for chatbots such as ChatGPT. Because robots operate in the real world, they need to be able to learn not only from text, but also from other modalities, especially visual data, so they can perceive the physical environment they operate in and make decisions and take actions based on those inputs.

Physical Intelligence has not yet announced any product or service, but Bloomberg said the company has been testing its AI software on robotic arms, performing tasks such as folding clothes, assembling boxes and making coffee. Earlier this week, the company released a new vision AI model based on reinforcement learning – a technique that enables models to improve over time as they learn from their experiences.

The startup has shared a video of its robotic arms in action on X, saying that the reinforcement learning technique has helped it to double its overall throughput, or the number of tasks it can complete per hour.

Our model can now learn from its own experience with RL! Our new π*0.6 model can more than double throughput over a base model trained without RL, and can perform real-world tasks: making espresso drinks, folding diverse laundry, and assembling boxes.

More in the thread below. pic.twitter.com/XN1VFYQey1

— Physical Intelligence (@physical_int) November 18, 2025

In testing, Physical Intelligence said the machines were put to work for three hours, and were able to complete each task in an average of three minutes.

To develop its models, the startup has spent a lot of money on gathering real-world data that’s used for training purposes. A year ago, when it raised $400 million in funding, the company said one of the biggest challenges it faces is getting enough large-scale multitask and multirobot data to train its models, and its experiments allow it to generate valuable data itself.

The startup says existing robots tend to be inflexible, because they’re designed to perform only one particular task in a specific environment. They can work around small changes in their environments but can’t adapt easily to extremely messy or complex spaces such as homes or other real-world places. Physical Intelligence’s goal is to change that, using general intelligence to enable robots to learn and become acclimatized to any environment and task.

The startup is not alone in thinking that AI can be used to create much more capable robots. Google LLC is also focused on robotic intelligence through its subsidiary Intrinsic, which just yesterday announced its partnering with Foxconn on a smart factory initiative. Meta Platforms Inc. is also developing AI for robots, and this week announced its latest Segment Anything computer vision models. Amazon has similar ambitions, and regularly introduces more sophisticated, AI-enabled robots in its logistics and warehouse facilities.

Similarly, there are dozens of startups that compete with Physical Intelligence, with the likes of Gecko Robotics Inc., Genesis AI, Cobionix Corp. and FieldAI Inc. some of the latest to attract investment capital in recent months.

Image: Physical Intelligence/X