Humanoid robots competing at the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, China.
Getty Images
The heat of the ongoing AI boom has spilled over to a famously difficult hardware space — humanoid robotics. Forbes has learned that a pair of Silicon Valley ventures, each with more than $100 million in funding, have been secretly developing human-shaped machines they hope will some day be able to perform tasks typically executed by people.
The first, Palo Alto-based Rhoda AI, raised a $162.6 million Series A round in April, bringing its total funding raised to $230 million and valuing the company at nearly $1 billion, per Pitchbook. It’s been working on a “general purpose bimanual manipulation platform,” known colloquially as a humanoid robot with two arms, according to documents viewed by Forbes. The company has told people that one of its key innovations is a humanoid capable of heavy lifting, a source familiar with the company’s plans told Forbes. Heavy lifting is a crucial task in many industrial settings, and many of today’s well-known humanoid robots have trouble lifting over 50 pounds while maintaining balance and stability.
Founded by Jagdeep Singh, who was founder and CEO of now public Quantumscape (market cap: $9.65 billion) and Infinera, which was acquired by Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2024, and has been working on Rhoda since 2024, per his LinkedIn. Other founding team members include Stanford professor Gordon Wetzstein and Vincent Clerc, who worked on Softbank’s Pepper humanoid robot, according to the documents. Rhoda declined to comment.
The second is “full-stack robotics” outfit Genesis AI, which raised a $105 million seed round earlier this year from investors including Khosla Ventures and Eric Schmidt. Documents seen by Forbes show the company developing a humanoid robot that has two arms, but wheels instead of legs. Genesis AI hopes to bring to market robots cheaper, lighter and less dangerous than other humanoids in development, like Tesla’s Optimus robot.
Genesis AI CEO Zhou Xian clarified that the company is working with hardware vendors to build custom robots, rather than building humanoids from scratch. The startup is largely focused on training software models that will control them, he said.
Genesis AI and Rhoda AI are joining a group of early-stage startups that have raised significant funds to make humanoid robots that can be used for industrial use cases on factory floors or household tasks like folding laundry. They have become a hot investment area lately: humanoid maker Figure AI said in September it had raised over $1 billion at a $39 billion valuation. Other well-funded competitors include Tesla, which is making a humanoid robot called Optimus, and 1X, which is reportedly raising $1 billion.
Despite the space’s nascency, there’s plenty of excitement: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this year that humanoid robots would be “potentially one of the largest industries ever,” and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said repeatedly that he believes the Optimus humanoid robot division will eventually be the most valuable part of Tesla, though the company has thus far manufactured very few of the robots and the division has reportedly faced significant engineering and production challenges.
But other investors continue to warn that the space may not be ready for commercialization.
“After the success of large language models, investors are optimistically looking to robotics as the next big thing and that’s driving a lot of hype,” said Kane Hsieh, general partner at Root Ventures, who invests in hardware startups. “But the part that feels odd is going from going from cool, promising research to doing 100 million dollar seed rounds.”