Abhinav Gupta

Abhinav Gupta is the co-founder and President of Skild AI. Prior to founding Skild, he was a tenured Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and a lead scientist at Facebook AI Research. Abhinav is one of the most cited researchers in computer vision and robotics, with pioneering work in visual learning, embodied AI, and robot manipulation. He earned his PhD from the University of Maryland and has spent over 15 years advancing the field of AI. Originally from India, Abhinav has been instrumental in developing technologies that enable robots to learn from visual data and generalize across tasks. At Skild, he leads research efforts to build the world's most capable robotic AI.

Skild AI is building a scalable, general-purpose AI foundation model for robotics. Founded in 2023 by Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, two former Carnegie Mellon University professors and Facebook AI Research scientists, the company aims to create a universal "brain" for robots that can perform any task across any environment and hardware platform. Unlike traditional robotics approaches that require task-specific programming, Skild's model is trained on diverse data to generalize across applications. The company raised a massive $300M Series A led by Coatue, SoftBank, and Lightspeed in 2024, and has since raised close to $1.4 billion, making it one of the most well-funded AI robotics startups globally.