Generalist, a robotics startup co-founded by former Google DeepMind researchers Pete Florence and Andy Zeng, has achieved a valuation of $3 billion after securing an additional $200 million in funding led by 8VC. This latest round brings the company’s total raised to $600 million following its Series B fundraising at a $2 billion valuation earlier this year.

The startup claims that its AI foundation model, Gen 1.5, can enable robots to master new tasks from video demonstrations as short as 3 to 12 seconds long. Generalist is working with select customers to tailor these models for specific use cases and has received early backing from major investors including 8VC, Radical Ventures, Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and AI researcher Fei-Fei Li.

The race to create a versatile AI model for robots is heating up with competitors like Physical Intelligence valued at $11 billion and SoftBank-backed Skild AI worth $14 billion. Genesis AI was in talks last month to raise capital at a $3 billion valuation, indicating the growing interest in this field.

The funding surge reflects an optimistic bet by some investors that robotics may soon reach its own “ChatGPT moment,” where robots can perform general tasks without explicit training for each task. However, because robots cannot be trained on the internet’s entirety like large language models (LLMs), some venture capitalists caution that a fully general robotics model might still take several years to develop.