Generalist, a robotics startup founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Pete Florence and Andy Zeng, along with former Boston Dynamics engineer Andrew Barry, has reached a $3 billion valuation. The company raised additional capital led by 8VC, with the fresh funds totaling nearly $200 million according to a regulatory filing. This new investment extends the company’s Series B round, which was originally announced in June at a $2 billion valuation and was led by Radical Ventures. With this latest addition, the round’s total funding now stands at $600 million.

Generalist is developing an AI foundation model designed to work across various robots. The company claims that its newly released Gen 1.5 model enables robots to master new tasks from video demonstrations lasting as short as 3 to 12 seconds. The startup has been operating quietly until recently and is currently working with a handful of customers, using their feedback to tailor the model for specific use cases.

Competition in this space is intensifying. Physical Intelligence is reportedly valued at $11 billion, SoftBank-backed Skild AI is valued at $14 billion, and Genesis AI was in talks as of last month to raise capital at a $3 billion valuation. The funding surge reflects a broader bet by some investors that robotics may soon reach its own “ChatGPT moment,” where robots can perform general tasks without being explicitly trained for each one. However, some venture capitalists caution that a truly general robotics model may still be years away, in part because robots cannot be trained on the entirety of the internet’s data in the same way large language models can.