FieldAI, the Irvine-based robotics intelligence company founded in 2023, has raised $405 million across two oversubscribed funding rounds, valuing the two-year-old startup at $2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The rounds drew participation from a broad group of investors including Bezos Expeditions, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Khosla Ventures, Intel Capital, Canaan Partners, Prysm Capital, Temasek, BHP Ventures, and Emerson Collective. Previous backers Gates Frontier and Samsung also reinvested.
The raise underscores growing demand for robotics platforms capable of scaling across industries as companies contend with labor shortages, safety challenges, and efficiency targets. Founder and CEO Ali Agha, who spent nearly a decade at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described the moment as an inflection point:
“We are growing. This funding announcement is to respond to the customer demand,” Agha told CNBC.
He added that much of the capital came from inbound interest: “Most investors approached FieldAI about investing,” he said.
FieldAI’s platform are Field Foundation Models (FFMs), a new class of physics-first foundation models designed specifically for embodied intelligence. Unlike conventional large language or vision models retrofitted for robotics, FFMs combine data-driven learning with physics-based uncertainty quantification, enabling risk-aware and embodiment-agnostic operations.
“Rather than attempting to shoehorn large language and vision models into robotics—only to address their hallucinations and limitations as an afterthought—we have designed intrinsically risk-aware architectures from the ground up,” Agha explained. “With Field Foundation Models, we are enabling robotic operations to scale seamlessly across diverse environments with varying risk profiles, moving beyond the constraints of traditional solutions.”
This approach allows robots to safely adapt to unfamiliar conditions without reprogramming, making them suitable for safety-critical deployments. FFMs have already been proven across quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots, and even passenger-scale vehicles.
Agha compared the design philosophy to human adaptability. “You evolve to be able to do various different tasks in different environments, and you have the ability to rapidly learn, [and] we believe that is a necessity in robotics. Yes, definitely you can optimize for one specific use case, but that is not the market we are going after,” he told TechCrunch.
FieldAI has already deployed its platform at customer sites worldwide, spanning Japan, Europe, and the U.S. Deployments cover construction, energy, manufacturing, security, and urban operations. Robots powered by FFMs are performing labor-intensive tasks and scaling quickly with “effortless transferability” across environments, according to the company.
“Suddenly you start to have that sense of, how much I know, and if I don’t know something, or if I’m making a decision, how confident I am in it,” Agha said. “Not just this spits out that, ‘Hey, here’s the next sort of an action,’ but it tells you how confident it is, and you as a customer can define this risk threshold, and [the] robot will be reactive to that.”
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, underscored the potential of FieldAI’s models:
“Enabling autonomy solutions at scale is an extremely difficult problem, but the deep expertise of the FieldAI team and their unique approach to embodied intelligence reflects a pragmatic path forward. FieldAI is at the forefront of the general-purpose robotics revolution, and its ability to rapidly deploy will unlock long-term economic and societal value.”
FieldAI’s team includes veterans from DeepMind, Google Brain, NASA JPL, SpaceX, Tesla Autopilot, Amazon, DARPA, and Microsoft, who have led many of the past decade’s breakthroughs in robotics and AI. The company has more than doubled its headcount in recent months to meet customer demand and plans to double again by the end of the year with the new capital.
Investor Jay Park, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Prysm Capital, highlighted the models’ adaptability:
“Their new class of foundation models offers the reliability and adaptability required for autonomous robotics deployment at scale across numerous sectors. FieldAI’s revolutionary models not only greatly broaden possible use cases but also enable risk-aware deployment, a critical element for scaling AI that has the potential to reshape how robots interact with the physical world.”
With major technical risks retired in its model architecture and global deployments underway, FieldAI said the new funding will accelerate productization, expansion into locomotion and manipulation, and strategic hiring.
“Developing and deploying real-world robotic AI is a very different journey from building many other product classes,” Agha wrote in a company announcement. “In just two years, creating a new model, deploying at customer sites, and expanding with those customers across the globe, from Japan to Europe to the U.S., stands as a true testament to this incredible team.”
