Rhoda raises $450 million to advance robotic intelligence

US robotics startup Rhoda AI has 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 USD 450 million in Series A funding to accelerate development and industrial deployment, according to a media release.

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.  

“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.”

“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 USD 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, the media release said.

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.