If co-founder Lachy Groom has any doubts, he doesn’t show it. He’s working with people who've been working on this problem for decades and who believe the timing is finally right, which is all he needs to know.

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Physical Intelligence, a two-year-old robotics startup valued at $5.6 billion, is developing general-purpose foundation models for robots using cross-embodiment learning. Founded by UC Berkeley and Stanford researchers alongside former Stripe employee Lachy Groom, the company has raised over $1 billion but provides no commercialization timeline to investors. Their approach focuses on training models with diverse data from various environments and hardware platforms, enabling robots to learn fundamental tasks like folding clothes and peeling vegetables. The company competes with Skild AI, which has already deployed commercially and raised $1.4 billion at a $14 billion valuation. Physical Intelligence prioritizes pure research over immediate commercial deployment, betting that this strategy will yield superior general intelligence despite the longer timeline.

Physical Intelligence, Stripe veteran Lachy Groom’s latest bet, is building Silicon Valley’s buzziest robot brains

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