Rhoda AI Exits Stealth with $450 Million Series A to Bring Robots Out of the Lab and Into the Real World

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Rhoda AI today announced its public launch after 18 months in stealth, unveiling FutureVision, a new approach to robotic intelligence based on video-predictive control and designed to operate beyond controlled laboratory demonstrations and into real-world environments. The company also announced it has raised $450 million in Series A funding to accelerate development and industrial deployment.

Traditional industrial robots perform well in structured environments but remain largely limited to pre-programmed trajectories. More recent AI approaches — particularly vision-language-action (VLA) models — allow robots to learn from data and have demonstrated impressive results in laboratory settings. However, many still struggle to cope with the variability of the real world, including shifting layouts, previously unseen objects, and unpredictable workflows. Rhoda was founded to address this gap.

Rather than relying primarily on teleoperated robot trajectories, Rhoda pre-trains its models on internet-scale video — hundreds of millions of videos — to build a strong prior on motion, physics, and physical interaction. The company then post-trains the models on smaller amounts of robot data to learn embodiment-specific behaviors and the mapping from video predictions to robot actions.

The resulting system continuously observes its environment, predicts future states as video, converts those predictions into actions, executes them, and re-observes the world — repeating this process every few hundred milliseconds in a closed loop.

Rhoda calls this proprietary architecture a Direct Video Action (DVA) model, designed to bridge perception and control. Unlike open-loop approaches that generate plans without continuous feedback, the DVA system updates its behavior dynamically as conditions change, enabling accurate physics-aware control in real time. The strong motion prior learned during Rhoda’s natively autoregressive video-based pretraining allows the model to learn new tasks efficiently, often requiring as little as ten hours of teleoperation data.

Built on this architecture, FutureVision serves as Rhoda’s intelligence layer — a foundation model that powers Rhoda systems today and is expected over time to be licensed to partners across different robotic hardware and software platforms.

“We believe the next era of robotics requires models that understand how the world moves — not just what it looks like or how it’s described in language,” said Jagdeep Singh, cofounder and CEO of Rhoda. “By learning from internet-scale video and operating in closed loop, our systems are designed to adapt to real-world variability in ways conventional approaches struggle to achieve. The goal is simple: robots that work in the real world, not just controlled lab settings.”

Rhoda’s technology has already demonstrated autonomous operation in production environments, where robots must handle continuously changing materials, layouts, and workflows. In a recent high-volume manufacturing evaluation, Rhoda completed a component-processing workflow in under two minutes per cycle without human intervention, exceeding customer KPIs.

“In manufacturing, tasks with high variability have historically resisted automation. The real challenge isn’t solving it once, it’s delivering consistent, reliable output under real-world production conditions,” said Jens Wiese, Managing Partner at VC firm Leitmotif and former Volkswagen Group executive. “What impressed us about Rhoda’s approach is its ability to adapt to conditions that typically require human intervention. Technologies like this can dramatically expand the scope of what can be automated, playing a pivotal role in re-industrializing mature economies.”

The $450 million Series A will support continued research and engineering investment, expansion of industrial deployments and customer pilots, and growth of Rhoda’s multidisciplinary team spanning generative AI, computer vision, and robotics.

“We believe the first company to deploy intelligent, manipulation capable robots at scale in real world environments will kick start a powerful data flywheel, creating a compounding advantage in capturing the long tail of real world edge cases,” said Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest. “At Premji Invest, we take a long term view and are highly selective in where we partner. We invest only when we believe a company has the potential to build a truly large, enduring business. We believe Rhoda has assembled the technical foundation, ambition, and execution capability required to achieve that goal, and we are excited to partner with this exceptional team to help bring the next generation of intelligent robots into the world.”

The company is backed by top technology investors, including Capricorn Investment Group, Khosla Ventures, Leitmotif, Matter Venture Partners, Mayfield, Premji Invest, Prelude Ventures, Temasek, and Xora, as well as Silicon Valley leaders such as John Doerr.

Rhoda is led by CEO and cofounder Jagdeep Singh, a serial deep-tech founder who has built and scaled multiple technology companies. Chief Science Officer Eric Ryan Chan, a Stanford researcher and leader in computer vision and generative modeling who previously served as a generative model architect at WorldLabs; Gordon Wetzstein, professor at Stanford University and head of the Computational Imaging Lab; and a team drawn from leading generative AI, computer vision, and robotics organizations.

About Rhoda

Rhoda is building a new class of robot foundation model designed to bring general intelligence into the physical world. By combining internet-scale video pretraining with closed-loop video predictive control, Rhoda aims to enable robots that can adapt, generalize, and operate autonomously across real-world environments. The company works with leading industrial partners across manufacturing and logistics.