Rhoda AI exits stealth as a $1.7B unicorn with $450M to train robots on video

What's the deal? Rhoda AI has raised $450 million in a Series A led by Premji Invest, valuing the startup at $1.7 billion. The round also includes Khosla Ventures, Singapore's state investor Temasek, and venture capitalist John DoerrDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The company, which has been incubating inside Khosla Ventures, is now emerging from stealth with a novel approach to training industrial robots.

Rhoda was founded by Jagdeep Singh, who previously founded and ran solid-state battery maker QuantumScape. Its core bet is that millions of publicly available internet videos — rather than the teleoperation data most robotics AI companies rely on — can train robots to handle a much wider range of real-world conditions. Rhoda calls this its Direct Video Action system.

Why now? Most robotics AI today is built on teleoperation data, where a human remotely controls a robot to generate training examples. The approach is expensive, slow, and yields models that struggle with variability — a slight change in the angle of a phone camera can be enough to cause a failure.

Rhoda argues that internet video, representing an almost unlimited supply of human activity in real-world settings, allows its models to generalise far better. The company says it has already run a successful test in the factory of a leading automotive firm using off-the-shelf hardware.

What could go wrong? Rhoda plans to make its own robots rather than purely licence its software — a capital-intensive choice that adds manufacturing and supply chain risk on top of the already hard problem of building reliable AI for industrial environments.

Vinod Khosla himself notes that "the real world is messy, complex," and that performing reliably on production lines is far harder than a lab demonstration. The robotics space is also drawing heavy investment across many competing approaches, and no clear winner has yet emerged.

The signal: Rhoda's raise reflects two converging trends: the rapid maturation of AI models capable of learning from unstructured video data, and growing urgency — particularly in the US — to automate manufacturing. Premji Invest managing partner Sandesh PatnamDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → explicitly frames the technology as critical to onshoring high-end production.

With Rhoda also developing humanoid robots and exploring a robots-as-a-service model, it is positioning itself for a broad slice of the industrial automation market — one that could prove enormous if the technology delivers outside the lab.

Sources:
Business Wire
Reuters
Morningstar
PYMNTS
Startup Researcher
Menlo Times
Bloomberg
Forbes

Image credit:
Rhoda AI

J.V.