# Physical Intelligence Inc.
**Physical Intelligence Inc.** (also written π or PI) is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company that develops general-purpose foundation models for controlling robots, rather than building robot hardware itself. Founded in early 2024 by researchers from [Google DeepMind](https://www.edgepedia.org/google-deepmind), Stanford, and UC Berkeley, the company has raised approximately $1.07 billion in primary equity funding and reached a $5.6 billion valuation with its November 2025 Series B.[1](https://thedynamics.ai/articles/physical-intelligence-history) • [2](https://sacra.com/research/physical-intelligence) • [3](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/robotics-startup-physical-intelligence-valued-at-5-6-billion)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | Early 2024, San Francisco; seven co-founders led by CEO Karol Hausman[1](https://thedynamics.ai/articles/physical-intelligence-history) |
| Product focus | Vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models, including π0, π0.5, π0.6, and π0.7[4](https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/ai_index_report_2026.pdf) |
| Series A | $400 million, November 2024, at a $2.4 billion valuation; investors included Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Lux Capital, and Bond Capital[2](https://sacra.com/research/physical-intelligence) |
| Series B | $600 million, November 2025, led by Alphabet's CapitalG at a $5.6 billion post-money valuation[3](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/robotics-startup-physical-intelligence-valued-at-5-6-billion) |
| Open source | π0 weights and code released as the openpi repository in February 2025[5](https://startup.genisisiq.com/physical-intelligence-a4e556/) |
| π0.5 training data | About 400 hours of mobile-manipulator data from roughly 100 home environments[6](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16054) |
| Later valuation talks | Reported talks in March 2026 to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation[7](https://humanoidanalytics.com/2026/09/27/the-race-for-general-purpose-physical-ai/) |
## Founding and team
Physical [Intelligence](https://www.edgepedia.org/intelligence) was founded in San Francisco in early 2024 by seven co-founders: CEO [Karol Hausman](https://www.edgepedia.org/karol-hausman), Chief Scientist Sergey Levine, Research Lead Chelsea Finn, Brian Ichter, COO Lachy Groom, Adnan Esmail, and Quan Vuong. Most came from robot-learning labs at Google DeepMind, Stanford, and Berkeley; Groom, an early Stripe employee turned robotics-focused angel investor, brought startup-operating experience the largely academic founding team otherwise lacked.[1](https://thedynamics.ai/articles/physical-intelligence-history)
The founders' backgrounds are central to the company's credibility in the field. Hausman worked on RT-2 at Google DeepMind, Levine leads the RAIL Lab at UC Berkeley, and Finn co-invented the MAML meta-learning algorithm at Stanford.[5](https://startup.genisisiq.com/physical-intelligence-a4e556/) In 2022, Hausman, Ichter, Levine, Finn, and others had shown at Google that a large language model connected to a one-armed robot could produce sensible multi-step plans for open-ended problems, such as cleaning up a spilled drink, without conventional programming.[8](https://www.wired.com/story/physical-intelligence-ai-robotics-startup/)
The company's founding bet is that the bottleneck in robotics is intelligence, not hardware: a single model meant to control any robot body.[1](https://thedynamics.ai/articles/physical-intelligence-history)
## Funding
The company came out of stealth in March 2024 with a $70 million seed round.[9](https://www.netfigo.com/startup/physical-intelligence/) In November 2024 it raised a $400 million Series A at a $2.4 billion valuation, with participation from [Jeff Bezos](https://www.edgepedia.org/jeff-bezos), OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Lux Capital, and Bond Capital.[2](https://sacra.com/research/physical-intelligence) WIRED reported the round as valuing the company at over $2 billion and described the [Mission District](https://www.edgepedia.org/mission-district-san-francisco) warehouse where robot arms folded T-shirts under the company's algorithms.[8](https://www.wired.com/story/physical-intelligence-ai-robotics-startup/)
In November 2025 the company closed a $600 million Series B led by CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund, at a $5.6 billion post-money valuation. Existing investors Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, and Jeff Bezos participated, and [Index Ventures](https://www.edgepedia.org/index-ventures) and [T. Rowe Price](https://www.edgepedia.org/t-rowe-price) joined as new investors.[3](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/robotics-startup-physical-intelligence-valued-at-5-6-billion) Bloomberg reported that the company has invested heavily in gathering real-world data to teach its models, in contrast to startups pursuing simulated data through world models.[10](https://www.axios.com/2025/11/21/robots-physical-intelligence-ai) In March 2026, Bloomberg reported the company was in talks to raise roughly $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, double its level four months earlier.[7](https://humanoidanalytics.com/2026/09/27/the-race-for-general-purpose-physical-ai/)
## Models
**π0.** In October 2024, π0 (pi-zero), the company's first generalist policy, was unveiled through both a technical blog post and a research paper, showing robots handling multiple tasks such as folding laundry, assembling boxes, and packing shirts.[5](https://startup.genisisiq.com/physical-intelligence-a4e556/) The model combines a pre-trained vision-language model backbone with an action expert that represents the action distribution via flow matching, a technique borrowed from AI image generation.[11](https://www.physicalintelligence.company/download/pi0.pdf) • [8](https://www.wired.com/story/physical-intelligence-ai-robotics-startup/) The system tokenizes the visual stream along with the robot's movement history and feeds it to a 3-5 billion parameter transformer model.[2](https://sacra.com/research/physical-intelligence) In February 2025 the company open-sourced the π0 weights and code as the openpi repository, which it describes as the first open-source general robot VLA foundation model.[5](https://startup.genisisiq.com/physical-intelligence-a4e556/) Stanford's AI Index Report 2026 cites π0 (2024) and π0.6 (2025) as examples of models performing tasks like laundry folding across different robot platforms without task-specific retraining.[4](https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/ai_index_report_2026.pdf)
**π0.5.** Released in April 2025, π0.5 builds on π0 and uses co-training on heterogeneous tasks, combining data from multiple robots, high-level semantic subtask prediction, web data, and verbal instructions to enable broad generalization.[6](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16054) Its pre-training uses about 400 hours of data from mobile manipulators performing household tasks in about 100 different home environments.[6](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16054) The company reports that π0.5 can control a mobile manipulator to clean kitchens and bedrooms in homes not present in the training data, performing multi-stage behaviors lasting 10 to 15 minutes.[12](https://www.physicalintelligence.company/download/pi05.pdf) Ablation experiments showed that excluding cross-embodiment and diverse-environment data significantly degrades performance, and that web data matters mainly for following language commands about out-of-distribution objects.[6](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16054)
**π0.7.** Published on April 16, 2026, π0.7 is a steerable generalist model that the company says can follow diverse language instructions in unseen environments, generalize zero-shot across robot bodies, and operate an espresso machine out of the box at a level matching specialized RL-finetuned models.[13](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15483) [TechCrunch](https://www.edgepedia.org/techcrunch) reported that the model's core claim is compositional generalization, combining skills learned in different contexts to solve tasks the model never encountered, breaking the previous pattern of training a specialist model per task.[14](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/physical-intelligence-a-hot-robotics-startup-says-its-new-robot-brain-can-figure-out-tasks-it-was-never-taught/) In one demonstration, the model operated an air fryer for which the entire training dataset contained only two relevant episodes; with zero coaching it made a passable attempt at cooking a sweet potato, and with step-by-step verbal instructions it performed successfully.[14](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/physical-intelligence-a-hot-robotics-startup-says-its-new-robot-brain-can-figure-out-tasks-it-was-never-taught/) The researchers also reported that an early air fryer experiment yielded a 5% success rate until about half an hour of refining the task instructions raised it to 95%, and that the model cannot yet execute complex multi-step tasks autonomously from a single high-level command.[14](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/physical-intelligence-a-hot-robotics-startup-says-its-new-robot-brain-can-figure-out-tasks-it-was-never-taught/)
## Position in the field
Physical Intelligence is one of the leading companies in the robot foundation-model layer of physical AI, alongside [Skild AI](https://www.edgepedia.org/skild-ai) and [Figure AI](https://www.edgepedia.org/figure-ai), competing with platform providers such as Nvidia and deployed-autonomy companies such as Waymo.[15](https://www.teahose.com/guides/physical-ai-companies) Its competitive position rests on founder pedigree, demonstrated long-horizon dexterous tasks such as laundry folding and assembly, and the openpi open-source ecosystem.[5](https://startup.genisisiq.com/physical-intelligence-a4e556/)
The field context matters for judging its claims. An industry analysis placing the field at the boundary between multi-task operation at known sites and zero-shot operation in unseen sites notes that Physical Intelligence's π0.7 result, laundry folding on a robot it had no training data for, is among the evidence for early zero-shot capability, while commercial deployments across the industry remain mostly at narrower levels.[7](https://humanoidanalytics.com/2026/09/27/the-race-for-general-purpose-physical-ai/) Standardized benchmarks for robotics remain underdeveloped, which makes external validation of generalist-model claims difficult; Physical Intelligence measured π0.7 against its own previous specialist models, finding the generalist matched their performance on tasks including making coffee, folding laundry, and assembling boxes.[14](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/physical-intelligence-a-hot-robotics-startup-says-its-new-robot-brain-can-figure-out-tasks-it-was-never-taught/)
## References
1. [The History of Physical Intelligence, The Dynamics](https://thedynamics.ai/articles/physical-intelligence-history)
2. [Physical Intelligence valuation, funding & news, Sacra](https://sacra.com/research/physical-intelligence)
3. [Robotics Startup Physical Intelligence Valued at $5.6 Billion, Bloomberg Law](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/robotics-startup-physical-intelligence-valued-at-5-6-billion)
4. [AI Index Report 2026, Section 2.7 Robotics and Autonomous Motion, Stanford HAI](https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/ai_index_report_2026.pdf)
5. [Physical Intelligence, Startup Diligence](https://startup.genisisiq.com/physical-intelligence-a4e556/)
6. [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization, arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16054)
7. [The Race for General-Purpose Physical AI, Humanoid Analytics](https://humanoidanalytics.com/2026/09/27/the-race-for-general-purpose-physical-ai/)
8. [Inside the Billion-Dollar Startup Bringing AI Into the Physical World, WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/physical-intelligence-ai-robotics-startup/)
9. [Physical Intelligence Funding 2026, Netfigo](https://www.netfigo.com/startup/physical-intelligence/)
10. [VCs are funding the AI-powered robot revolution, Axios](https://www.axios.com/2025/11/21/robots-physical-intelligence-ai)
11. [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control, Physical Intelligence](https://www.physicalintelligence.company/download/pi0.pdf)
12. [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization, Physical Intelligence](https://www.physicalintelligence.company/download/pi05.pdf)
13. [π0.7: a Steerable Generalist Robotic Foundation Model with Emergent Capabilities, arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15483)
14. [Physical Intelligence says its new robot brain can figure out tasks it was never taught, TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/physical-intelligence-a-hot-robotics-startup-says-its-new-robot-brain-can-figure-out-tasks-it-was-never-taught/)
15. [Top Physical AI Companies in 2026, Ranked, Teahose](https://www.teahose.com/guides/physical-ai-companies)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Computing and digital systems › Modern AI: foundation models, generative AI, and the AI industry › AI companies, people, and products › AI startups and application companies*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 15, 2026 · Edited: Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026 · Last review: Oct 15, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license