Temasek-backed Rhoda AI secures $450 M Series A funding to accelerate robotics development
Rhoda AI, a robotics company supported by Temasek, has raised $450 million in Series A funding to expedite robotics development and industrial deployment.
According to a statement released by the company on Tuesday, the Series A will fund the company’s ongoing investments in research and engineering, the growth of its multidisciplinary team that includes generative artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and robotics, as well as the expansion of industrial deployments and customer pilots.
Leading technology investors like Capricorn Investment Group, Khosla Ventures, Leitmotif, Matter Venture Partners, Mayfield, Premji Invest, Prelude Ventures, Temasek, and Xora, along with Silicon Valley titans like John Doerr, support the company.
“We believe the next era of robotics requires models that understand how the world moves — not just what it looks like or how it’s described in language,
“By learning from internet-scale video and operating in closed loop, our systems are designed to adapt to real-world variability in ways conventional approaches struggle to achieve. The goal is simple: robots that work in the real world, not just controlled lab settings,” said Jagdeep Singh, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rhoda.
Gordon Wetzstein, a professor at Stanford University and head of the Computational Imaging Lab; Eric Ryan Chan, a Stanford researcher and leader in computer vision and generative modeling who previously worked as a generative model architect at WorldLabs; Jagdeep Singh, a serial deep-tech founder who has built and scaled numerous technology companies; and a team assembled from top generative AI, computer vision, and robotics organizations make up Rhoda.
Rhoda AI also revealed FutureVision, a new method of robotic intelligence based on video-predictive control that is intended to function outside of controlled laboratory demonstrations and in real-world settings, following an 18-month period of stealth.
The method functions as Rhoda’s intelligence layer, a foundation model that currently powers Rhoda systems and is anticipated to be licensed to partners across various robotic hardware and software platforms in the future.
It is observed that conventional industrial robots are mostly restricted to pre-programmed trajectories, but they function well in structured environments. More modern AI techniques, especially vision-language-action (VLA) models, have shown remarkable results in lab settings and enable robots to learn from data.
Nonetheless, a lot of people still find it difficult to deal with the unpredictable workflows, changing layouts, and previously unseen objects that characterize the real world. Rhoda was established to fill this void.
“We believe the first company to deploy intelligent, manipulation capable robots at scale in real world environments will kick start a powerful data flywheel, creating a compounding advantage in capturing the long tail of real world edge cases,” said Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest.
“At Premji Invest, we take a long term view and are highly selective in where we partner. We invest only when we believe a company has the potential to build a truly large, enduring business,
“We believe Rhoda has assembled the technical foundation, ambition, and execution capability required to achieve that goal, and we are excited to partner with this exceptional team to help bring the next generation of intelligent robots into the world,” he added.
