An Orange County company has scored major backing in the global race to develop robots for use on construction sites, urban delivery runs, energy projects and manufacturing.
FieldAI revealed Aug. 20 that it has raised $405 million in the company’s latest two funding rounds, counting among its backers Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Vinod Khosla.
“Enabling autonomy solutions at scale is an extremely difficult problem, but the deep expertise of the FieldAI team and their unique approach to embodied intelligence reflects a pragmatic path forward,” Khosla, one of Silicon Valley’s most astute investors, said in a statement on the fundraise. “FieldAI is at the forefront of the general-purpose robotics revolution, and its ability to rapidly deploy will unlock long-term economic and societal value.”
The robotics company’s valuation jumped to $2 billion from $500 million, placing it in the “unicorn” category of startups worth more than $1 billion. It is now one of Orange County’s most valuable privately held tech firms.
Coming out of Stealth Mode
Ali Agha, chief executive of FieldAI, pulled back the curtain on what the stealth robotics startup has been building since he founded the Orange County company in 2023.
“We are building general-purpose robotic intelligence that works across industries and environments,” he wrote on LinkedIn after the company’s Aug. 20 funding announcement.
At the core of the platform are “field foundation models,” or FFMs, that are a new class of physics first models that are “risk-aware and embodiment-agnostic, enabling robots to operate in complex, unpredictable, real-world settings,” said Agha, who spent seven years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before founding FieldAI.
He said the systems are automating “labor-intensive tasks” while proving that “safer, more reliable autonomy at scale is not only possible but transformative.”
After two years of quiet development, Agha said the company plans to use the raise to accelerate “productization and business scale-up.”
The company’s tech has already begun deploying across industries, with customers in construction, security, energy, manufacturing, and urban operations in various markets, including the U.S., Japan and Europe.
Sophisticated Robot Brains
FieldAI, founded in 2023, says its architecture “marks a breakthrough in the robotics space.”
Its systems operate in real-time autonomously, with decisions made directly by the models, seamlessly integrating into real customer workflows.
The FFMs enable safe and reliable robot behaviors when managing scenarios that they have not been trained on, navigating dynamic, unstructured environments without prior maps, GPS or predefined paths.
FFMs’ robust nature enables the models to safely and dynamically adapt to new and unexpected conditions without requiring reprogramming, enabling robots to execute complex tasks reliably in unstructured environments.
The company says its robotics deliver “automation like never before.”
The Aug. 20 financing announcement, which included a just-completed $314 million round, comes amid growing expectations that robots will increasingly carry out tasks now performed by humans.
“Our team has spent years in the field, driving major breakthroughs in ‘field robotics’ and safety-critical robotic AI in complex environments,” said Agha, who lives in Mission Viejo.
Gates Praises FieldAI
The upstart has received accolades from no less an expert than Gates.
“Some robots don’t just need great ‘bodies,’ they need great brains, too. That’s what FieldAI—a robotics company based in Southern California that doesn’t build robots—is trying to create,” Gates wrote in a blog post last year.
“Instead of focusing on the hardware of these machines, FieldAI is developing AI software for other companies’ robots that enables them to perceive their environments, navigate without GPS (on land, by water, or in the air), and even communicate with each other.”
Previous investors have included Gates Frontier and Samsung, FieldAI said.
Current investors include Bezos Expeditions, BHP Ventures, Canaan Partners, Emerson Collective, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, Prysm and Singapore’s Temasek, according to FieldAI.
“FieldAI’s revolutionary models not only greatly broaden possible use cases but also enable risk-aware deployment, a critical element for scaling AI that has the potential to reshape how robots interact with the physical world,” Jay Park, co-founder and managing partner of Prysm Capital, said in the statement.
Agha told CNBC that FieldAI has added more than 100 positions over the last few months to meet growing customer demands and address labor shortages.
FieldAI’s Connection to Mission Viejo
Several top executives at FieldAI have connections that include Qualcomm, NASA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology—and Mission Viejo.
CEO Ali Agha conducted postdoctoral studies at MIT, where he worked alongside Shayegan Omidshafiei, who earned a doctorate from MIT and is now FieldAI’s chief scientific officer.
The two also have experience at San Diego-based Qualcomm, where Agha started the company’s efforts on robotic autonomy in 2016.
Agha, who lives in Mission Viejo, went on to seven years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He worked closely with David Fan, who is now FieldAI’s chief technology officer. Both said they worked on autonomous vehicle competitions sponsored by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Another top executive who worked on DARPA was Eric Krotkov, who leads business development at FieldAI and who the company website says has won fame as the “grandfather” of the PackBot and Talon robots.
“We achieved many significant first-of-its kind results, including conducting the first fully autonomous many-kilometer exploration with any quadrupedal robot to date, and further showcasing fully autonomous multi-robot coordination (with up to 11 heterogeneous robots, legged, wheeled, drones) for inspection and search operations in complex environments,” the company said on its website.
The background of the executives includes several well-known tech companies such as Google DeepMind, Tesla, Microsoft, SpaceX, Nvidia, Amazon, Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute.
With its new infusion of capital, FieldAI is publicly ramping up its headcount.
Its website lists about 60 open jobs, primarily in office, from a senior technical recruiter to mathematicians to multiple robotics and software engineers. FieldAI said it is looking for applicants to tackle ambitious challenges.
“We’re building risk-aware, reliable foundation models to solve the hardest challenges in autonomy—deployed globally to unlock the full potential of embodied intelligence,” Fan wrote on LinkedIn.
“Our systems learn from experience and deliver continuous, real-world improvements in the field.”
Irvine or Mission Viejo HQ?
FieldAI cited Irvine as its headquarters in late August, when it announced its new funding deal.
State records and CoStar data, however, indicate that FieldAI remains based in Mission Viejo, where the company was incorporated in 2023. To date, there have been no reports of the company leasing space in Irvine, and company officials could not be reached for comment.
The Mission Viejo office is located in an unassuming business park next to large distribution facilities used by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon as well as Target, a few miles from the Irvine Spectrum. The office was open, with some 50 or so workers on site during an afternoon visit last week.
—Mark Mueller
