The rise of AI has spread to a hardware field known for its complexity: humanoid robotics. Forbes has discovered that two Silicon Valley companies, each with more than $100 million in funding, have been secretly developing human-shaped machines that they hope can one day perform tasks normally performed by people.
The first, Palo Alto-based Rhoda AI, raised a $162.6 million Series A round in April, bringing its total funding raised to $230 million and valuing the company at nearly $1 billion, according to Pitchbook. It has been working on a “general-purpose bimanual manipulation platform,” known colloquially as a two-armed humanoid robot, according to documents seen by Forbes.
The company has told people that one of its key innovations is a humanoid capable of lifting heavy objects, a source familiar with the company’s plans told Forbes. Lifting heavy objects is a crucial task in many industrial environments, and many of today’s well-known humanoid robots have trouble lifting more than 50 pounds while maintaining balance and stability.
Founded by Jagdeep Singh, founder and CEO of Quantumscape (market cap: $9.65 billion) and Infinera, a publicly traded company that was acquired by Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2024, he has been working at Rhoda since 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Other members of the founding team include Stanford professor Gordon Wetzstein and Vincent Clerc, who worked on Softbank’s Pepper humanoid robot, according to the documents. Rhoda declined to comment.
The second is Genesis AI, an end-to-end robotics company, which raised a $105 million seed round earlier this year with investors including Khosla Ventures and Eric Schmidt.
Documents seen by Forbes show that the company is developing a humanoid robot with two arms, but wheels instead of legs. Genesis AI hopes to bring to market robots that are cheaper, lighter and less dangerous than other humanoids in development, such as Tesla’s Optimus robot.
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Genesis AI CEO Zhou Xian clarified that the company is working with hardware vendors to build custom robots, rather than creating humanoids from scratch. The startup primarily focuses on training software models that will control them, he said.
Genesis AI and Rhoda AI join a group of early-stage startups that have raised significant funding to create humanoid robots that can be used in industrial applications, such as factories, or household tasks, such as folding laundry.
Lately, they have become a very attractive area of investment: humanoid maker Figure AI announced in September that it had raised more than $1 billion, at a valuation of $39 billion. Other well-funded competitors include Tesla, which is developing a humanoid robot called Optimus, and 1X, which is reportedly raising $1 billion.
Despite the nascent space activity, there is plenty of excitement: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this year that humanoid robots would be “potentially one of the biggest industries in history,” and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said he believes the Optimus humanoid robot division will eventually be the most valuable part of Tesla, although the company has made very few so far. robots, and the division has reportedly faced significant engineering and production challenges.
But other investors continue to warn that the space may not be ready for commercialization.
“After the success of the large language models, investors are optimistic about robotics as the future, and that is generating a lot of excitement,” said Kane Hsieh, general partner at Root Ventures, a company that invests in hardware startups. “But what is strange is going from interesting and promising research to a $100 million seed funding round.”
This article was originally published by Forbes US
