Skild AI
A Pittsburgh robotics company building general-purpose 'robot brain' models that work across different machines.
Skild AI spun out of Carnegie Mellon University with a deliberately unfashionable goal: instead of building a robot, build the software brain that any robot can use. Most robotics companies pair one model with one machine, so a model trained on a warehouse arm is useless on a different arm. Skild trains on a mixture of robot data, human video and simulation so the same model can be dropped into different bodies.
Its models are named with an S, and S1, released in August 2026, is the one that got attention: it copies a task from a single video demonstration without any retraining. The company is backed by investors including SoftBank, Nvidia and Sequoia.