Skild AI, founded by CMU robotics professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, is developing a universal robot brain — a single foundation model capable of controlling diverse robot embodiments across manipulation, locomotion, and navigation tasks simultaneously. The company raised $300M in a landmark 2024 round at a $1.5B valuation before shipping a product, reflecting investor conviction in the general-purpose robot intelligence thesis. Skild's approach emphasizes world model pre-training on internet-scale data combined with robot-specific fine-tuning, positioning it as an infrastructure layer for the entire humanoid industry.