Industrial robotics startup RoboForce has secured $52 million in an oversubscribed funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $67 million. The round was led by YZi Labs, a $10 billion fund, with participation from Jerry Yang alongside existing investors including Myron Scholes, Gary Rieschel and Carnegie Mellon University.
The funding will accelerate the development of RoboForce’s next-generation robotics foundation model, expand production of its general-purpose physical robots and support the company’s transition from research to large-scale commercial deployment.
Addressing the growing gap in industrial labour
Across many industries, physically demanding work is becoming harder to staff. Tasks that require repetitive movement, exposure to extreme conditions or safety risks increasingly struggle to attract workers. This shortage is slowing projects, raising operational costs and creating new safety challenges for companies operating at industrial scale.
RoboForce is positioning its technology to address that gap. Its platform focuses on what the company calls Robo-Labor, autonomous machines designed to handle high-risk and physically intensive work across sectors such as utility-scale solar installations, data centres, mining, logistics hubs, manufacturing sites and global shipping operations.
Founded in 2023 by Leo Ma and Calvin Zhou in California, RoboForce brings together robotics and engineering talent from leading institutions and companies including Carnegie Mellon University, University of Michigan, Amazon Robotics, Google, Waymo, Cruise, Tesla Robotics, ABB and Apple.
By combining robotics hardware with learning systems that improve through real-world deployment, RoboForce aims to build a new class of machines capable of performing critical industrial work at scale, helping industries operate more safely, efficiently and consistently in environments where human labour is increasingly difficult to secure.
Rather than building robots for narrow tasks, RoboForce is developing systems capable of operating across multiple industrial environments, adapting to real-world conditions where unpredictability is the norm.
Physical AI agents designed for real-world work
At the core of RoboForce’s technology is a robotics foundation model combined with a stack of physical AI agents that control robot behaviour. These agents interpret real-world data and coordinate actions across the robot’s systems, enabling machines to carry out complex physical tasks reliably.
The platform continuously improves through a data-driven learning loop. Information collected from deployed robots feeds back into the system, where it is combined with high-fidelity simulation environments to refine policies and behaviours. Over time, this creates a self-reinforcing data cycle that steadily increases robot capability.
To support this system, RoboForce is working with NVIDIA to power its computing and simulation infrastructure. Robots operate at the edge using NVIDIA Jetson Thor, while development and training leverage tools such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, NVIDIA Isaac Lab, NVIDIA Cosmos for synthetic data generation and NVIDIA OSMO for cloud-to-edge orchestration.
Together, these technologies create a continuous data flywheel that allows robots to learn from both simulated and real-world environments, accelerating deployment in complex industrial settings.
From research prototype to large-scale deployment
The latest investment will help RoboForce scale its operations across three strategic priorities. First, the company plans to strengthen its robotics foundation model and data infrastructure , allowing the system to learn from every robot deployed in the field.
As a part of it, RoboForce will ramp up manufacturing of its physical AI robots and expand global supply chain operations to ensure the machines can operate reliably in demanding industrial conditions.
The company will focus on commercial expansion by converting pilot programmes into full production deployments, building recurring revenue streams across sectors where labour shortages are most severe.
“Robo-Labor is essential for work that is dull, dirty, and dangerous,” said Leo Ma, Founder & CEO of RoboForce. “This problem centers on human workers’ availability, cost, and safety, and its impact spans across most critical industrial sectors. Our mission is to elevate humans into safer, higher value roles while robots take on the most demanding industrial tasks.”
