RoboForce has closed a $52 million oversubscribed funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $67 million. The round was led by YZi Labs, a $10 billion investment fund, with participation from Jerry Yang, co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo. The new capital will accelerate RoboForce's next-generation robot foundation model, expand its fleet of general-purpose Physical AI robots, and advance its manufacturing readiness for commercial deployment at scale.
The funding also deepens the company's existing investor base. Myron Scholes, the Nobel Laureate economist, Gary Rieschel, Founding Partner at Qiming Ventures, and Carnegie Mellon University all continue to back the company. The round being oversubscribed points to growing confidence in Physical AI as a viable labor solution for heavy industry.
Industrial operators across the world are facing a steady, structural gap. Work that is physically demanding, repetitive, and safety-critical still depends almost entirely on human labor — and that labor is becoming harder to find. The result is slower project timelines, higher operational costs, and increased safety risk. RoboForce is designed to step into that gap, taking on what the company calls the "dull, dirty, and dangerous" tasks that define so many industrial roles.
"Robo-Labor is essential for work that is dull, dirty, and dangerous," said Leo Ma, Founder and 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."
RoboForce will deploy the new capital across three priorities. The first is building out its Physical AI platform and AI data flywheel, combining real-world fleet data and high-fidelity simulation into a closed-loop system that compounds intelligence with each deployment. The second is scaling manufacturing and global supply chain operations to ensure the robots can perform reliably in harsh, dynamic industrial settings.
The third priority is commercialization. The company is actively transitioning pilot programs into full production deployments, with a focus on establishing recurring revenue across sectors including utility-scale solar, data centers, mining, shipping, manufacturing, and logistics.
RoboForce is developing its Physical AI foundation model and robotics stack in collaboration with NVIDIA, using NVIDIA's end-to-end computing and simulation technologies as its AI backbone. The system runs on NVIDIA Jetson Thor at the edge and uses NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for simulation and robot learning. NVIDIA Cosmos handles synthetic data generation, while NVIDIA OSMO manages cloud-to-edge orchestration. Together, these tools form a continuous data flywheel that accelerates how the robots learn and adapt across complex environments.
Founded in 2023, RoboForce was built by engineers and researchers with backgrounds at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, Amazon Robotics, Google, Waymo, Cruise, Tesla Robotics, ABB, and Apple. The company sits at the intersection of physical robotics and AI-driven autonomy, with a focus on making robots that can handle environments too harsh, too risky, or too physically demanding for consistent human work.
The company's approach is built on what it calls "Robo-Labor," a model in which robots take over the most taxing industrial tasks, allowing human workers to move into safer and higher-value roles. The goal is not to replace the workforce, but to redeploy it. RoboForce has consistently positioned itself as a complement to human labor rather than a substitute for it.
RoboForce is backed by YZi Labs, Jerry Yang, Myron Scholes, Gary Rieschel, Qiming Ventures, and Carnegie Mellon University. The company's investor base reflects a mix of deep capital, academic credibility, and experience building technology businesses at scale.
