New York-based startup General Intuition is in talks to raise a new funding round at a pre-money valuation of $6 billion, with participation from new investors including Valor Equity Partners, Point72 Ventures and Seven Seven Six, according to sources familiar with the deal. The round has not yet been finalized, meaning the valuation and final funding amount could change.
The talks come just weeks after the company raised $320 million at a valuation of $2.3 billion. Alongside the new investors, existing investors such as Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst are also participating in the current round. A source close to the deal said the round was oversubscribed, while the company continues to receive interest from other investors.
From Motion Models to Robotic Bodies
General Intuition is building a foundation model intended to train general AI agents to move through space and time. The company plans to use the new funds to improve its general model, with a greater focus on what it calls “robotic embodiments,” meaning transferring the model’s capabilities to robotic bodies capable of interacting with the physical world.
This will include increased spending on computing infrastructure and hiring more talent. The company has a partnership with CoreWeave through a unit or entity called neolab, according to the source material, to provide computing-related infrastructure.
How Did the Idea Begin?
CEO Pim de Witte founded General Intuition after spinning it out in October last year from Medal, a platform for sharing video game clips. The startup used hundreds of millions of recorded hours of gameplay, along with “action labels” that record which buttons the player pressed and when they pressed them, as an initial dataset.
Investor Vinod Khosla believes these labels could play an important role in the emergence of what he described as “intuition,” meaning the model’s ability to generalize across tasks on which it was not explicitly trained. But the source does not provide operational results or independent demonstrations proving how successful this approach is in robotics, so the transition from gaming data to controlling physical bodies remains a work in progress.
Why Does This Funding Matter?
The news does not represent the launch of a new robotic product, but rather reveals the scale of investment backing for AI models capable of understanding motion and acting in physical environments. If the round closes on the terms being discussed, General Intuition will gain greater resources to develop its model, computing capabilities and human resources, following a large previous round only a short time ago.
The deal also highlights interest from investors known for investing in capital-intensive technology fields. Valor Equity Partners is known for backing SpaceX, while General Intuition would, if the investment is confirmed, be the company’s first AI lab investment since SpaceX, according to the material. TechCrunch contacted Valor to confirm the investment, and the source contained no final confirmation.
The news is still developing, and the material does not contain details about the value of the new funding, the ownership stake or the closing timeline. Therefore, the $6 billion valuation should be treated as a targeted pre-money valuation, not a completed deal.