Genesis AI emerged from stealth with a mission to
unlock unlimited physical labor. The company is building a universal robotics
foundation model (RFM) and a horizontal robotics platform, raising $105 million
co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, with
participation from Bpifrance, HSG, and
visionary leaders Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel. Physical labor contributes an estimated $30-40 trillion to the
Global GDP, yet over 95% of it remains unautomated due to the
limitations of current automation solutions. Today's robotic systems, such as
industrial arms, rely on brittle, rigid, and overfitted software stacks. These
systems are narrow in scope, costly to deploy, and challenging to scale.
Genesis aims to revolutionize the next generation of general-purpose robots by
unlocking unprecedented robustness, flexibility, and cost efficiency -
ultimately automating all physical labor.
Genesis brings a data-centric, full-stack approach to physical AI
- building a scalable and universal data engine that unifies high-fidelity
physics simulation, multimodal generative modeling, and large-scale real robot
data collection. Its simulation stack, developed entirely in-house, will
generate rich synthetic data at scale, together with a more efficient and
scalable real-world data collection system. This dual engine of synthetic and
real data bridges historically siloed domains to collect the largest-scale,
most diverse, and highest quality data to train RFMs.
"General-purpose robots powered by physical AI will define the
next major chapter of human history. While digital AI has made extraordinary
progress, physical AI - the intelligence that allows machines to perceive,
understand, and interact with the real world - has lagged behind," said Zhou
Xian, CEO of Genesis. "We're here to change that. By building on the
foundations laid by existing digital AI models, we're bringing human-level
intelligence into the physical world. Genesis's unique approach by fueling digital
AI knowledge to drive the emergence of physical AI will deliver unmatched
capability, scalability, and cost-efficiency to unlock unlimited physical
labor. With 75% of global
companies struggling to fill jobs, physical AI is more essential than ever."
Founded by top academic and industry technical talents from
Mistral AI, Nvidia, Google, CMU, MIT, Stanford, Columbia and UMD, with deep
expertise across the full stack of physics simulation, graphics, robotics, and
large-scale AI model training and deployment, Genesis is well-positioned to
rapidly execute its vision through a differentiated approach to physical AI.
The company also plans to open-source components of its data engine and
foundation model to empower developers, researchers, and partners to build on
its breakthroughs and accelerate progress across the broader field of physical
AI.
"Even in the most ‘automated' industries today, the robot-to-human ratio rarely exceeds 1:30, due to
the long tail of tasks requiring dexterity, cognition, mobility, and real-world
reasoning that current robots simply can't handle," said Eclipse Partner,
Charly Mwangi. "General-purpose robotics is the breakthrough we've been waiting
for and stands to impact trillions in labor value across sectors. Genesis has
the vision, strategy, and world-class team to define the era of physical AI in
order to unlock unlimited physical labor through general-purpose robotics."
"Physical AI has yet to scale like LLMs because collecting
and aligning real-world data can be operationally complex," said Kanu Gulati of
Khosla Ventures. "Genesis is taking a full-stack approach by integrating
best-in-class simulation data with real-world robotics data in a continuous,
closed-loop system. Owning the entire data pipeline in-house gives them a
unique data advantage. We're excited to back Genesis early as they work to
build a universal foundation model for robotics."