Rhoda AI Raises $450 Million to Automate Manufacturing and Logistics

Robotic intelligence firm Rhoda AI emerged from stealth Tuesday (March 10) and announced it raised $450 million in a Series A funding round.

The company is building a robot foundation model that combines pretraining on hundreds of millions of videos with closed-loop video predictive control to enable robots to operate autonomously in real-world environments, it said in a Tuesday (March 10) press release.

Rhoda will use the new funding to accelerate the model’s development and industrial deployment, according to the release.

“By learning from internet-scale video and operating in closed loop, our systems are designed to adapt to real-world variability in ways conventional approaches struggle to achieve,” Rhoda Co-founder and CEO Jagdeep Singh said in the release. “The goal is simple: robots that work in the real world, not just controlled lab settings.”

Rhoda’s technology has already demonstrated autonomous operation in production environments, and the company’s new funding will support additional industrial deployments and customer pilots, per the release.

The company works with industrial partners across manufacturing and logistics, according to the release.

Jens Wiese, managing partner at venture capital firm Leitmotif, which is one of Rhoda’s backers, said in the release that in manufacturing, it has traditionally been difficult to automate tasks that have high variability.

“What impressed us about Rhoda’s approach is its ability to adapt to conditions that typically require human intervention,” Wiese said. “Technologies like this can dramatically expand the scope of what can be automated, playing a pivotal role in reindustrializing mature economies.”

PYMNTS reported in November that physical AI is emerging as the next stage of robotics as advances in sensing, perception and large AI models give machines capabilities that traditional automation never supported.

AMI, an AI startup founded by Meta’s former chief scientist Yann Lecun, announced Tuesday that it raised $1.03 billion to help build AI systems that “understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe.”

It was reported in February that Project Prometheus, an AI lab co-founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Google executive Vikram Bajaj, is raising “tens of billions of dollars” to apply AI to manufacturing and industry, while also acquiring companies that its co-founders expect to be disrupted by the technology.