Explained: What Softbank and Nvidia’s investment in Skild signifies
The size and speed of the round mark embodied AI as the next arena for platform battles.
SoftBank and Nvidia’s plan, as reported by Reuters first, to pour more than $1 billion into Skild AI, at a mooted $14 billion valuation, underlines how quickly capital is shifting from text models to AI that controls machines in the physical world. If completed, the deal would also cement Skild as one of the most richly valued robotics-software bets of this AI cycle.
What Skild represents
Skild, founded in 2023 by former Meta AI researchers and backed early by Amazon and Lightspeed, is building a hardware-agnostic “brain” for robots rather than making robots itself. Its foundation model is trained to generalise across robot types and tasks, from warehouse work to household chores, positioning the firm as an operating layer for “embodied AI” rather than a single-use application.
The company has already raised $300 million in a Series A and $500 million in a Series B this year; a new round would almost triple its last $4.7 billion valuation, unusually fast even by AI-startup standards. That escalation reflects investor expectations that a small number of platforms will dominate training data, model performance and developer ecosystems in robotics.
Why SoftBank and Nvidia care
For SoftBank, the talks are part of Masayoshi Son’s attempt to rebuild an AI and robotics thesis after the bruising Vision Fund years, including a recent $5.4 billion deal for ABB’s robotics business. SoftBank has been an investor in Skild since at least its Series A, and the latest round would deepen exposure to software “brains” that can sit atop its growing stable of hardware assets.
Nvidia already supplies Skild’s GPU infrastructure and has been expanding from chips into full AI stacks, including robotics simulation and software tools. A larger equity stake would help Nvidia defend its platform position if robotics workloads become a major source of demand for its next generation of accelerators.
Signals for the robotics race
The size and speed of the round mark embodied AI as the next arena for platform battles, alongside foundation models for language and images. It also raises the bar for rivals such as Tesla’s Optimus and Figure AI, which are tying software more tightly to proprietary humanoid hardware.
As one person familiar with the talks told Reuters, the deal would be “one of the largest private financings in the robotics AI sector to date,” underscoring how capital is clustering around a few perceived winners. Whether Skild’s universal brain can move from pilots to large-scale deployment will now be watched as a bellwether for the commercial readiness of general-purpose robots.