March 10 (Reuters) - Rhoda AI on Tuesday said it has raised $450 million in a Series A funding round that values the company at $1.7 billion and unveiled a robot intelligence system it says can handle the unpredictability of industrial environments.
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence models that help robots understand language, interpret visual information and predict how the physical world behaves, combined with growing investment from major tech and robotics companies, are expected to drive
robotics adoption.
Newer compact high-performance processors are equipping robots for real-time perception and broad-skill operation.
That momentum is fueling a race in humanoid robots specifically, led by Tesla, Figure AI, Unitree, Agility Robotics, and dozens of Chinese startups.
However, industry experts caution that reliability, safety certification and cost will remain key hurdles for large-scale commercial deployment of general-purpose robots.
Rhoda's new robot intelligence platform, FutureVision, works by first studying hundreds of millions of internet videos to learn how objects move and how the physical world behaves.
It then uses that knowledge to constantly anticipate what is about to happen around it and translate those predictions into physical movements, a cycle it repeats dozens of times per second.
The approach targets a longstanding problem in robotics: most machines perform well in controlled, predictable environments but struggle when something unexpected happens.
The company expects to eventually license FutureVision to companies running robotic hardware and software platforms.
Rhoda AI, which emerged from stealth on Tuesday, said its platform is designed to integrate with a wide range of robotic hardware, allowing manufacturers and logistics operators to deploy intelligent robots without rebuilding existing systems.
Its funding round drew backing from Khosla Ventures, Temasek, Mayfield, Premji Invest and Capricorn Investment Group, among others.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
