Genesis AI

What it builds

Genesis AI develops a universal robotics foundation model, branded GENE, together with the manipulation hardware it runs on. The company was co-founded by Zhou Xian, who completed a robotics PhD at Carnegie Mellon and serves as CEO, and Théophile Gervet, a former Mistral AI research scientist who is now the company's president. It operates from two bases, San Carlos, California and Paris, and its press releases carry both datelines.

Genesis came out of stealth on 1 July 2025 with a $105 million seed round co-led by Eclipse Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Bpifrance, HSG, Alven, Northzone and Eric Schmidt among the other backers. Sifted, which had tracked the company while it was unnamed, reported the round closed in tranches and mixed equity, convertible bonds and debt. When the company resurfaced in reporting that October it was still characterised as primarily a software company, training models for robots built by others.

From model to full stack

That framing changed in May 2026, when Genesis unveiled GENE-26.5 alongside its own hardware: a human-scale dexterous hand with twenty active, back-drivable degrees of freedom and a 1:1 match to human hand geometry, plus a tactile-sensing glove used to capture demonstrations directly from people. The hand, Genesis Hand 1.0, was built with Shenzhen's Wuji Tech as manufacturing collaborator. Later the same month the company released Genesis World 1.0, a GPU-accelerated simulation stack it says it uses for closed-loop evaluation rather than for generating training data.

Product and customers

Eno, the company's first general-purpose robot, was announced on 16 June 2026. It uses a wheeled base rather than legs, a tower of articulated panels that changes the robot's height and reach and folds down for storage, two arms fitted with the company's hands, and an optional screen in place of a head. The decision not to build a biped is central to how Genesis positions the machine. On the same day it announced a multi-phase partnership with LG CNS that begins with evaluation of Eno at LG operations in the United States and across LG CNS's industrial customer base. Genesis says production and targeted customer deployments will start by the end of 2026; pricing has not been published.

The organisation is small relative to its ambitions: around 60 people as of May 2026, split roughly evenly between Europe and the US. It has been hiring senior operators, including a head of legal and a head of operations in May 2026, and Vivian Sun as VP of commercial and strategy in April 2026. In July 2026, Bloomberg reported the company was in talks to raise roughly $500 million at a $3 billion pre-money valuation; those talks were described as ongoing and no close has been confirmed.

Position in the field

Genesis sits between the model-first robotics labs it competes with for talent and the vertically integrated humanoid developers it competes with for industrial pilots. Its distinguishing choices are the wheeled, non-anthropomorphic form factor, the emphasis on human-scale hands as the data-collection interface, and a European engineering base unusual among US-headquartered physical AI companies.