# Abhinav Gupta

> Abhinav Gupta is the co-founder and president of Skild AI and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Across research in computer vision, self-supervised learning and embodied AI, he has pursued a consistent question: how can machines learn common sense from the world rather than from hand-written labels? That work ran from his 2009 doctoral thesis and the Never Ending Image Learner to robots that learned grasping through 50,000 attempts, and now to Skild AI's attempt to build one adaptable intelligence layer for many kinds of robots.

- **Role:** Co-founder and President at Skild AI; Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute
- **Organizations:** Skild AI, Carnegie Mellon University, Meta AI Research, University of Maryland, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
- **Education:** Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Ph.D. in Computer Science; thesis: Beyond Nouns and Verbs, University of Maryland, College Park
- **Known for:** Received the 2020 IAPR J.K. Aggarwal Prize for contributions to unsupervised and self-supervised learning in computer vision and robotics., Received the 2018 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award., Received the 2016 IEEE PAMI Young Researcher Award.

## Career timeline

- **2009** — Completed a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Maryland and joined Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute as a postdoctoral researcher.
- **2011** — Joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty.
- **2013** — Co-authored the NEIL project, a Never Ending Image Learner designed to extract visual knowledge and common-sense relationships from web images.
- **2016** — Received a Sloan Research Fellowship and the PAMI Young Researcher Award; co-authored award-winning work on self-supervised robotic grasping from 50,000 trials and 700 robot-hours.
- **2018** — Received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and began a period at Facebook AI Research, where he led robotics research.
- **2020** — Received the IAPR J.K. Aggarwal Prize for contributions to unsupervised and self-supervised learning in computer vision and robotics.
- **2022** — Returned full-time to Carnegie Mellon in May.
- **2023** — Co-founded Skild AI with Deepak Pathak to build a general-purpose robotics foundation model.
- **2024** — Skild AI emerged from stealth with a $300 million Series A at a $1.5 billion valuation.
- **2026** — Skild AI announced a $1.4 billion Series C at a valuation above $14 billion, introduced its S1 in-context robot model, and reported more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue ten months after its first commercial deployment.

## Achievements

- Received the 2020 IAPR J.K. Aggarwal Prize for contributions to unsupervised and self-supervised learning in computer vision and robotics.
- Received the 2018 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.
- Received the 2016 IEEE PAMI Young Researcher Award.
- Named a 2016 Sloan Research Fellow in computer science.
- Received an Okawa Foundation Research Grant and a Bosch Young Faculty Fellowship.
- Co-authored the ICRA 2016 Best Student Paper on learning robotic grasping from 50,000 trials and 700 robot-hours.
- Co-founded Skild AI, which announced a $1.4 billion Series C at a valuation above $14 billion in January 2026.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Skild AI reported more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue across more than 60 paying customers, ten months after its first commercial deployment.
- **2026-09** — Skild AI published a physical self-play result showing post-training of its S1 base model through competition in simulation.
- **2026-08** — Skild AI introduced S1, an in-context robotics model designed to learn a new task from a single video demonstration without updating its weights.
- **2026-04** — Skild AI acquired Zebra Technologies' robotics division, formerly Fetch Robotics, to expand warehouse deployments.
- **2026-01** — Skild AI raised $1.4 billion in a Series C led by SoftBank, valuing the company above $14 billion.

## Links

- Website: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~abhinavg/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinav-gupta-319193164
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/gupta_abhinav_

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/abhinav-gupta
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-26