Temasek-backed robotics firm Rhoda AI has raised $450 million in Series A funding to accelerate robotics development and industrial deployment.
The firm said in a statement on Tuesday that the Series A will support its continued research and engineering investment, expansion of industrial deployments and customer pilots, and growth of its multidisciplinary team spanning generative artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and robotics.
The company is backed by top technology investors, including Capricorn Investment Group, Khosla Ventures, Leitmotif, Matter Venture Partners, Mayfield, Premji Invest, Prelude Ventures, Temasek, and Xora, as well as Silicon Valley leaders such as John Doerr.
“We believe the next era of robotics requires models that understand how the world moves — not just what it looks like or how it’s described in language,
“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. The goal is simple: robots that work in the real world, not just controlled lab settings,” said Jagdeep Singh, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rhoda.
Rhoda is led by Jagdeep Singh, a serial deep-tech founder who has built and scaled multiple technology companies, Chief Science Officer Eric Ryan Chan, a Stanford researcher and leader in computer vision and generative modeling who previously served as a generative model architect at WorldLabs; Gordon Wetzstein, professor at Stanford University and head of the Computational Imaging Lab; and a team drawn from leading generative AI, computer vision, and robotics organizations.
Rhoda AI has also on Tuesday announced its public launch after 18 months in stealth, unveiling FutureVision, a new approach to robotic intelligence based on video-predictive control and designed to operate beyond controlled laboratory demonstrations and into real-world environments.
The approach serves as Rhoda’s intelligence layer — a foundation model that powers Rhoda systems today and is expected over time to be licensed to partners across different robotic hardware and software platforms.
It is noted that traditional industrial robots perform well in structured environments but remain largely limited to pre-programmed trajectories. More recent AI approaches — particularly vision-language-action (VLA) models — allow robots to learn from data and have demonstrated impressive results in laboratory settings.
However, many still struggle to cope with the variability of the real world, including shifting layouts, previously unseen objects, and unpredictable workflows. Rhoda was founded to address this gap.
“We believe the first company to deploy intelligent, manipulation capable robots at scale in real world environments will kick start a powerful data flywheel, creating a compounding advantage in capturing the long tail of real world edge cases,” said Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest.
“At Premji Invest, we take a long term view and are highly selective in where we partner. We invest only when we believe a company has the potential to build a truly large, enduring business,
“We believe Rhoda has assembled the technical foundation, ambition, and execution capability required to achieve that goal, and we are excited to partner with this exceptional team to help bring the next generation of intelligent robots into the world,” he added.