Documentation / Market
02 / 22
Physical AI is becoming an industry
Talent and capital are moving from software models into machines that can act in the world.
AI is moving out of software and into machines that can see, decide and act, drawing engineers from frontier model labs, autonomous driving programmes and long-running robotics research groups. Capital is following that shift, but the supporting stack remains fragmented.
| Company | Focus | Founding / lead talent | Disclosed funding | Founder pedigree |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 2003 | Humanoid / Optimus | Elon Musk, Milan Kovac | Public | PayPal · SpaceX |
| 2014 | Home humanoid | Bernt Børnich | $125M+ | Univ. of Oslo · Halodi |
| 2016 | Industrial humanoid | Jeff Cardenas, Nick Paine | ~$1.0B | UT Austin · NASA |
| 2022 | Humanoid platform | Brett Adcock | $1.7B+ | Archer · Vettery |
| 2023 | Robot foundation model | Deepak Pathak, Abhinav Gupta | $1.7B+ | Meta AI · CMU |
| Physical Intelligence2024 | Robot foundation model | Karol Hausman, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine | $1.1B | Google · Stanford · Berkeley |
| 2024 | Home robots | Kyle Vogt, Paril Jain, Luke Holoubek | $300M+ | Cruise · Twitch · Tesla |
| 2025 | World models / physical AI | Yann LeCun, Alexandre LeBrun | $1.03B | Meta FAIR · Nabla |
| 2026 | Industrial robotics | Travis Kalanick | $1.7B | Uber · CloudKitchens |
- 2003PublicHumanoid / OptimusElon Musk, Milan Kovac
- 2014$125M+Home humanoidBernt Børnich
- 2016~$1.0BIndustrial humanoidJeff Cardenas, Nick Paine
- 2022$1.7B+Humanoid platformBrett Adcock
- 2023$1.7B+Robot foundation modelDeepak Pathak, Abhinav Gupta
- Physical Intelligence2024$1.1BRobot foundation modelKarol Hausman, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine
- 2024$300M+Home robotsKyle Vogt, Paril Jain, Luke Holoubek
- 2025$1.03BWorld models / physical AIYann LeCun, Alexandre LeBrun
- 2026$1.7BIndustrial roboticsTravis Kalanick
Every team still has to assemble its own data, evaluation, hardware and deployment loop. That repeated work slows the field even as model and hardware capability improve.