The robotics startup FieldAI has hit a $100 million milestone.
The company, which builds software to help robots navigate challenging environments such as mines and construction sites, said it has grown to over $100 million in revenue and in customer contracts. The contracts come from 30 customers across Europe, Asia, and the US, CEO and cofounder Ali Agha told Business Insider.
“We have seen very, very fast growth in the last several months,” Agha said.
Founded in 2023, FieldAI is building a “universal general-purpose brain” that works across robots, tasks, and environments. Its software can run on a range of machines, from humanoids and robot dogs to drones and industrial rovers, to help them operate safely and autonomously in unpredictable environments.
Last year, the startup raised $405 million from investors including Jeff Bezos’ family office, Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, Khosla Ventures, and the venture arms of Nvidia, mining giant BHP, and Intel. The round valued FieldAI at $2 billion.
FieldAI is headquartered in Irvine, California, and the Bay Area, and it has hired robotics and AI talent from Google DeepMind, Waymo, Tesla, Nvidia, Boston Dynamics, and Amazon. Its customers include construction firms, data center operators, defense companies, and more.
Before FieldAI, Agha spent seven years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developing autonomous systems for exploring difficult environments, including Mars.
FieldAI’s robotics software is used in the real world
FieldAI is among a small group of robotics startups with paying customers using its software to operate robots in the real world. Many companies are still in development or pilots with their robots because of a shortage of real-world training data. While AI chatbots are trained on vast amounts of text and images from the internet, no comparable trove of data exists yet for robots.
Agha said FieldAI’s advantage comes from building software called Field Foundation Models that do not require huge amounts of training data for every task. Instead, the company uses physics and probability to build AI that is “risk-aware” and can make safe decisions in uncertain situations.
That has allowed FieldAI to deploy robots with customers more quickly than competitors. At first, robots equipped with a FieldAI “brain” performed basic tasks and collected data from real-world work. FieldAI used that data to improve its software, which helped robots handle more complex situations.
“If you don’t have this architecture, it’s a chicken and egg problem,” Agha said. “You cannot deploy because you need data to have a model that works, and you need a brain to deploy to collect the data in the real world.”
In construction, for example, FieldAI’s robots can walk sites and take photos that update digital copies of construction projects. Usually, people walking around sites perform this work, and a robot is better suited because it can do it 24/7 and produce more detailed and accurate notes, Agha said.
The data that robots collect on-site helps improve FieldAI’s software and enables it to add more robot capabilities over time.
Investors like Khosla Ventures backed FieldAI
Kanu Gulati, a partner at Khosla Ventures and an investor in FieldAI, first met the startup when Agha visited the firm’s Menlo Park office with an early prototype. The robot navigated from the backyard to the garage on its own, created a 3D map, and found its way down a steep flight of stairs.
“It was impressive,” Gulati said.
After speaking with potential customers in construction, mining, and nuclear sites, Gulati said it became clear how large the market could be for robots in those industries. She said FieldAI has an advantage because its robots are already deployed and collecting data from doing real work.
That gives the company “probably the best shot at doing the next level of complicated tasks,” Gulati said, including moving materials and handling larger objects.
While FieldAI is still early in its development, Agha sees a future where robots of many shapes and sizes work across the economy.
“We are going to see robots in almost every aspect of our lives, starting on the industrial side and coming to the consumer side,” he said.
Agility Robotics is another company with real-world deployments, including in Amazon warehouses and GXO logistics facilities. The humanoid company plans to go public in a deal valuing it at about $2.5 billion.
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