robotics / AI
By lens · 1 takes across the edition
The Robot Report · United States · Generalist AI raises $400m at $2bn for embodied foundation models, as its GEN-1 hits 99% task success
First detailed coverage of the round. Describes GEN-1, released in April 2026, as the model that improved task success from 64% to 99% on a standard benchmark suite, completing dexterous manipulation roughly 3x faster than comparable prior models. Names founder Pete Florence as a former DeepMind senior scientist who helped create RT-2 and PaLM-E, the two foundational papers that established the embodied-AI research programme.
“GEN-1 hits 99% task success on dexterous benchmarks, up from 64% for prior models, and completes tasks 3x faster, marking a step-change in embodied AI capability.”