General Intuition targets $6B valuation for robotics AI

New York-based General Intuition is negotiating a new funding round at a $6 billion pre-money valuation, drawing interest from prominent new investors including Valor Equity Partners, Point72 Ventures, and Seven Seven Six. Existing backers Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst are also set to participate in the oversubscribed round. This massive step up in valuation comes just weeks after the startup secured $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation.

Spun out last October from the video game clip-sharing platform Medal by CEO Pim de Witte, General Intuition is building a foundation model designed to train generalized AI agents to navigate space and time. The startup utilizes hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay footage paired with action labels, which are detailed logs of which buttons players pressed and when, as its foundational dataset. Investor Vinod Khosla suggested these action labels are crucial for the emergence of intuition, allowing models to generalize across tasks without explicit training.

The startup plans to allocate the fresh capital toward enhancing its general model with a specific focus on robotic embodiments. This expansion will require increased spending on computational infrastructure, supported by its partnership with cloud provider CoreWeave, alongside aggressive talent acquisition. For the broader AI industry, the deal underscores the intense investor appetite for physical AI and robotics. Notably, the investment marks the first time Valor Equity Partners has backed an artificial intelligence lab since its early investment in SpaceX.