FieldAI, an Irvine, California-based company specialising in robotic autonomy and physical AI, has secured $405m through two consecutive funding rounds.

The investment increases the company’s valuation to $2bn, according to sources referenced by Reuters. The funding, which was oversubscribed, is expected to drive FieldAI’s global expansion and enhance product development in robotics intelligence.

The latest round attracted investments from Bezos Expeditions, BHP Ventures, Canaan Partners, Emerson Collective, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture arm), Prysm and Temasek, among others. Gates Frontier and Samsung are among the previous investors.

According to FieldAI, this financial boost follows an upsurge in customer adoption and expansion contracts across various industrial settings globally.

FieldAI focuses on creating a universal software platform for various robots operating in diverse environments. These robots are actively deployed across sectors such as construction, energy, manufacturing, urban delivery, and inspection in regions spanning Japan, Europe, and the US.

The company’s systems perform autonomously in real-time, integrating seamlessly into existing operational workflows.

Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla said: “Enabling autonomy solutions at scale is an extremely difficult problem, but the deep expertise of the FieldAI team and their unique approach to embodied intelligence reflects a pragmatic path forward.

“FieldAI is at the forefront of the general-purpose robotics revolution, and its ability to rapidly deploy will unlock long-term economic and societal value.”

FieldAI plans to use the newly raised capital for global growth initiatives, continued product innovation in locomotion and manipulation technologies, and strategic hiring with a goal to double its workforce by year-end.

The company aims to address industry demands for automation due to labour shortages and efficiency requirements.

Central to FieldAI’s innovation are its Field Foundation Models (FFMs), designed specifically for embodied intelligence. These models differ from traditional vision or language models by being built from scratch to handle uncertainties and physical constraints inherent in real-world environments.

This foundation allows for safe robot operations even in uncharted scenarios without prior mapping or predefined paths.

According to the company, FFMs demonstrate adaptability across diverse robotic embodiments such as quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots, and larger vehicles. With a hardware-agnostic design, these models facilitate scalable deployment across various form factors.

FieldAI’s leadership comprises experts from entities like DeepMind, Google Brain, Tesla Autopilot, NASA JPL, and others. The team’s experience spans projects from Mars missions, to Earth-based industrial solutions.

FieldAI founder and CEO Ali Agha said: “Our team has spent years in the field, driving major breakthroughs in ‘field robotics’ and safety-critical robotic AI in complex environments.

“With a deep understanding of the resilience and robustness required to deploy robotic AI in complex real-world conditions, we have taken a fundamentally different approach.

“Rather than attempting to shoehorn large language and vision models into robotics—only to address their hallucinations and limitations as an afterthought—we have designed intrinsically risk-aware architectures from the ground up.”