skild-ai
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Abhinav Gupta Taught Machines to Look. Now He Wants Them to Learn by Doing.
For two decades, Abhinav Gupta has argued that intelligence comes from contact with the world. His route from computer vision lab to factory floor is a story of fewer labels, more experiments, and robots finally learning on the job.
Deepak Pathak
Deepak Pathak is the co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, the Pittsburgh robotics company building a single general-purpose 'brain' that can run any robot from a quadruped to a humanoid. A Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he earned a gold medal at IIT Kanpur and a PhD at UC Berkeley before betting that physical intelligence, not language, is the real path to AGI. In January 2026 Skild raised $1.4 billion at a valuation north of $14 billion, backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.
James Detweiler
James Detweiler is a General Partner at Felicis, the venture firm behind investments in Shopify, Fitbit, and Twitch. Promoted to General Partner in February 2026, he has sourced, led, or co-led 25+ investments across AI, robotics, vertical software, and defense - including Skild AI (now valued at $14B), RunwayML, and Mercor. A summa cum laude Dartmouth grad in Physics and Mathematical Finance, he honed his AI investment lens at Zetta (the first AI-focused venture fund) and SVB Capital before joining Felicis. He founded the Felicis Fellows program to bridge top AI researchers and entrepreneurship, and coined the investment thesis 'The Great Splintering' - the idea that as thinking becomes cheap, value shifts to trust, judgment, and presence. He grew up in Santa Clara as the youngest of five children of an actress and a painter.
Stephanie Zhan
Stephanie Zhan is a General Partner on Sequoia Capital's early-stage team, where she has been backing founders from the first check since 2015. A Stanford computer science graduate who grew up across Hong Kong and Beijing during the early internet era, she brings a global lens and a deep technical instinct to bets on AI, developer tools, and the physical world. She was first partner to Linear, Reflection AI, Skild AI, Ricursive Intelligence, Mach Industries, Middesk, and Tavus - a portfolio that reads like a map of the next decade of computing. Her TED AI talk on superintelligent AI captures what makes her unusual among her peers: she's not just predicting the future, she's actively funding the people building it.