Robotics startup Generalist has reached a valuation of $3 billion following a recent $200 million funding round led by 8VC. Regulatory filings and sources revealed that this round is an extension of the company's $400 million B-round financing led by Radical Ventures in June, which valued the company at $2 billion, increasing the total B-round funding to $600 million.

Generalist was co-founded in 2024 by Pete Florence, Andy Zeng, and Andrew Barry, former researchers at Google DeepMind and a former engineer at Boston Dynamics. The company has previously received investments from 8VC, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and renowned AI researcher Fei-Fei Li.

The company focuses on developing AI foundational models that can work with various robots. Its latest 1.5 generation model allows robots to quickly learn new tasks by watching video demonstrations of just 3 to 12 seconds. Generalist is currently working with a few clients, adjusting the model based on real-world application feedback to fit specific scenarios.

The robotics industry is currently experiencing a surge in the development of models for general tasks. In addition to Generalist, Physical Intelligence, valued at $11 billion, Skild AI, valued at $14 billion, and Genesis AI, valued at $3 billion, are also competing in this space. Although the capital boom reflects investors' expectations of a "ChatGPT moment" for the robotics industry, technological breakthroughs and commercialization of general models still require time due to the inability of robots to directly use data from the entire web for training.