Physical Intelligence

Physical Intelligence (pi) is a San Francisco robotics foundation model company that raised over $1 billion including a $600 million Series B at a $5.6 billion valuation led by Alphabet CapitalG alongside Lux Capital, Bond, Redpoint, and Sequoia Capital. Founded in 2023 by former Google Brain researchers Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, and Karol Hausman, the company builds a generalist AI brain for robots rather than robot hardware itself.

Its flagship model pi0 (pi-zero) is a Vision-Language-Action flow model trained on data from diverse robot types and tasks, enabling robots to perform activities they were never explicitly programmed for. Physical Intelligence open-sourced pi0 in February 2026, and its latest pi0.5 model doubled throughput on dexterous manipulation tasks including espresso machine filter insertion, folding previously unseen laundry, and cardboard box assembly.

The company hardware-agnostic approach means pi0 runs on existing robots from multiple manufacturers, allowing robot makers to add generalist intelligence without building their own foundation models. Physical Intelligence is positioned as the foundation model layer of the robotics stack — analogous to what OpenAI is for language AI — with plans to deploy models across robot fleets via SaaS licensing.