Physical Intelligence

What it builds

Physical Intelligence — written as π and generally shortened to Pi — is a San Francisco company that builds vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models for robot hardware it does not manufacture. Its own site describes the goal as learning algorithms for a model that will control any robot to do any task. The company was founded in 2024 by researchers from Google DeepMind, UC Berkeley and Stanford — Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Brian Ichter, Quan Vuong and Adnan Esmail — together with former Stripe executive Lachy Groom. Hausman is chief executive; the office is in the Mission District.

The model line

π0, described by the company as its first generalist policy, was published in October 2024, followed by π0.5 and the Hi Robot planner; weights and code for π0 and an autoregressive π0-FAST variant were released publicly. In November 2025 the company argued that "RL is back" with π*0.6, trained using a method it calls Recap that mixes demonstrations, teleoperator corrections and autonomous practice. In December it reported gold-tier results on "Robot Olympics" chores and, separately, that transfer from human video emerges with scale rather than requiring bespoke capture hardware. Through early 2026 it added multi-scale memory spanning fifteen minutes, RL Tokens for last-millimetre precision, and in April π0.7, framed around compositional generalization.

Commercial approach

Pi's route to market is a software layer sold or licensed into other people's robots rather than a machine of its own. It has published deployment data from partners, including laundry folding with Weave Robotics and packaging with Ultra, and in 2025 announced a research partnership with Chinese robot maker AgiBot. The company has not disclosed revenue or customer counts; one Korean trade outlet characterised it in March 2026 as having no commercial products or revenue. Prior work spans stationary bimanual arms, mobile manipulators and third-party humanoids, so the registry entry is better read as a supplier to humanoid developers than as a humanoid maker.

Funding and standing

A $600 million round led by Alphabet's CapitalG in November 2025 valued the company at $5.6 billion, with Lux Capital, Bond, Redpoint, Sequoia, Thrive Capital, T. Rowe Price, OpenAI and Jeff Bezos among the investors, bringing disclosed capital to roughly $1.1 billion. Four months later Bloomberg reported the company was in talks for about $1 billion at more than $11 billion, with Founders Fund set to participate and Lightspeed also in discussions. No primary confirmation that the round closed was found; private-market databases disagree on the current totals.

Landscape

Pi's position is unusual in that its models compete less with humanoid builders than with the in-house autonomy stacks those builders maintain, which puts it alongside other robot-foundation-model efforts while making hardware companies both rivals and prospective customers.