Robotics AI company Physical Intelligence valuation surges toward $20 billion, still with no revenue to date.

Beating AI News Flash: Robot AI startup Physical Intelligence (π) is in talks for at least $1 billion in new funding at a target valuation of about $20 billion. Existing investors Avenir and Lux Capital are expected to lead the round.

The company currently has no revenue, but its valuation has risen from $5.6 billion last November to $11.5 billion earlier this year. If this round is completed, it will further rise to about $20 billion.

Physical Intelligence was founded in 2024, with a founding team from Google DeepMind, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley. Its investors include Bezos, CapitalG, and Thrive Capital. It does not build robots; instead, it develops a general-purpose AI "brain" that can adapt to different robot hardware, enabling robots to learn practical tasks such as folding clothes, organizing dishes, and picking strawberries.

On October 13, the company opened the beta test of the Pi API, allowing external developers to upload their own robot operation data, with the platform handling model fine-tuning and providing cloud inference services. In this way, robot manufacturers can try to teach their machines new tasks without training an entire model from scratch.

Competitor Skild AI completed $1.4 billion in funding in January this year at a valuation of more than $14 billion. Unlike Physical Intelligence, which still has no revenue, Skild announced in September this year that it already has more than 60 paying customers and that annualized recurring revenue has exceeded $100 million, with about 90% coming from robot operation tasks.

Both companies aim to turn the robot "brain" into general-purpose software and sell it to different hardware manufacturers.