New York-based General Intuition, the startup building a foundation model that trains generalized AI agents to move through space and time, is in talks to raise funding at a $6 billion pre-money valuation from new investors including Valor Equity Partners, Point72 Ventures, and Seven Seven Six, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Existing investors including Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst are also participating in the round. The fresh funds would come just weeks after General Intuition raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation.
The news confirms <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-world-models-robotics-33ab46cb?eafs_enabled=false” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>earlier reporting on the deal for what is becoming one of the hottest startups tackling physical AI.
CEO Pim de Witte spun out General Intuition last October from his video game clip-sharing platform Medal, using its hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay and “action labels” — records of what buttons a player pressed and when — as an initial dataset.
Investor Vinod Khosla recently told TechCrunch that he believes those action labels will be a key part of the “emergence of intuition,” or the ability for a model to truly generalize across tasks that it wasn’t explicitly trained on.
General Intuition is still finalizing the round, and atup continues to field interest from investors. The company intends to use the funds to focus to improve its general model with a focus on robotic embodiments. That means spending more on compute infrastructure (the company has a partnership with neolab CoreWeave) and hiring more talent
Valor Equity Partners is known for backing SpaceX. TechCrunch has reached out to confirm its investment in General Intuition, which would be the first AI lab the fund has invested in since SpaceX.
This story is developing. Please check back in for updates.
