Here is your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday July 11th.

Today on Forbes, this $1.5 billion AI company

is building a general purpose brain for robots.

Robots, whether they are bipedal humanoids handling basic factory tasks

or four-legged military robot dogs intended for urban combat need brains.

Historically, these have been highly specialized and purpose built.

But a Pittsburgh-based robotics startup claims it's created a single off-the-shelf intelligence This I founded in May 2023 by Abhienov Gupta and Deepak Pathak, two former

Carnegie Mellon University professors, has created a foundational model for what

it describes as a quote general purpose brain that can be slotted into a variety of robots

enabling them to do things like climbing steep slopes walking over objects

obstructing its path and identifying and picking up items.

The company announced on Tuesday that it has raised 300 million dollars at a 1.5

billion dollar valuation in a Series A funding round led by LightSpeed Ventures,

Soft Bank, Kothu, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,

with participation from CRV, Felisis Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Amazon, and General Catalyst, among others.

Ravi Raj Jain, the Light Speed Partner, who also led the company's Seed Round in July

2023, told Forbes he was wildly impressed with skilled

AI's models when he first saw them being pressure tested last April.

Robots using them were able to perform tasks and environments that they'd never seen before and hadn't been designed for demos.

He said, quote,

The robots at that time were able to climb stairs, and I think it's really crazy how well they were able to do it because it's a very complex stability problem

And still more impressive the robots using skilled AI models also demonstrated, quote,

...