FieldAI, a specialist developer of physical AI and robotic autonomy, has raised $405 million in two consecutive funding rounds.
Investors include Bezos Expeditions, BHP Ventures, Canaan Partners, Emerson Collective, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, NVentures (Nvidia’s venture capital arm), Prysm, Temasek, and others. Previous investors include Gates Frontier and Samsung.
The latest round was oversubscribed, following rapid customer adoption and multiple expansion contracts for FieldAI’s general-purpose robotics intelligence, with successful testing and deployments across hundreds of complex real-world industrial environments.
FieldAI is at the forefront of the general-purpose robotics revolution, developing a single software brain that is powering a variety of robots in many diverse environments. FieldAI robots are deployed in daily operations at numerous customer sites worldwide.
Deployments span a variety of robot types in high-complexity environments from Japan, to Europe, to the US, with some of the world’s largest companies in industries including construction, energy, manufacturing, urban delivery and inspection.
FieldAI’s systems operate in real-time autonomously, with decisions made directly by the models at the edge, seamlessly integrating into real customer workflows.
They have logged unprecedented real-world data and operational hours, demonstrated a transformative pace of model evolution, and delivered value and cost-effective autonomy at scale.
As industries turn to automation to address labor shortages, safety risks, and efficiency goals, demand for FieldAI’s platform continues to accelerate.
Capital to accelerate global expansion
The newly raised capital will accelerate FieldAI’s global growth, support continued product development across locomotion and manipulation, and enable strategic hiring to scale its team as it plans to double headcount by the end of the year.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, says: “Enabling autonomy solutions at scale is an extremely difficult problem, but the deep expertise of the FieldAI team and their unique approach to embodied intelligence reflects a pragmatic path forward.
“FieldAI is at the forefront of the general-purpose robotics revolution, and its ability to rapidly deploy will unlock long-term economic and societal value.”
A new era of robot intelligence
At the core of FieldAI’s platform are Field Foundation Models (FFMs): a new class of “physics-first” foundation models built specifically for embodied intelligence.
Unlike conventional vision or language models retrofitted for robotics, FFMs are designed from the ground up to grapple with uncertainty, risk, and the physical constraints of the real world.
This enables safe and reliable robot behaviors when managing scenarios that they have not been trained on, navigating dynamic, unstructured environments without prior maps, GPS, or predefined paths.
Ali Agha, Founder and CEO of FieldAI, says: “Our team has spent years in the field, driving major breakthroughs in ‘field robotics’ and safety-critical robotic AI in complex environments.
“With a deep understanding of the resilience and robustness required to deploy robotic AI in complex real-world conditions, we have taken a fundamentally different approach.
“Rather than attempting to shoehorn large language and vision models into robotics – only to address their hallucinations and limitations as an afterthought – we have designed intrinsically risk-aware architectures from the ground up.
“With Field Foundation Models, we are enabling robotic operations to scale seamlessly across diverse environments with varying risk profiles, moving beyond the constraints of traditional solutions.”
The FieldAI architecture marks a breakthrough in the robotics space. FFMs’ robust nature enables the models to safely and dynamically adapt to new and unexpected conditions without requiring reprogramming, enabling robots to execute complex tasks reliably in unstructured environments.
FFMs have already been proven across a wide range of embodiments, including quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots, and passenger-scale vehicles. Their hardware-agnostic design allows different form factors and manipulators to operate using the same core intelligence, accelerating deployment and scalability.
Jay Park, co-founder and managing partner of Prysm Capital, says: “We are excited and privileged to be partnering with the FieldAI team on this next phase of their journey.
“Their new class of foundation models offers the reliability and adaptability required for autonomous robotics deployment at scale across numerous sectors.
“FieldAI’s revolutionary models not only greatly broaden possible use cases but also enable risk-aware deployment, a critical element for scaling AI that has the potential to reshape how robots interact with the physical world.”
Led by world-renowned veterans in robotic AI from DeepMind, Google Brain, Tesla Autopilot, NASA JPL, SpaceX, Zoox, Cruise, Amazon, DARPA, TRI, and others, FieldAI combines deep research expertise with unmatched real-world deployment experience.
From Mars rovers to Earth’s mines and factories, the FieldAI team has driven landmark breakthroughs in field robotics – winning DARPA challenge circuits, scaling foundation models across autonomous fleets, and delivering autonomy at scale. That ethos of solving for the field is what inspired the company’s name.
