Deepak Pathak

Deepak Pathak is the co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, where he is building a general-purpose AI foundation model for robotics. Before founding Skild, Deepak was an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and a researcher at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). He received his PhD from UC Berkeley, where he worked on self-supervised learning and curiosity-driven AI agents. Originally from India, Deepak completed his undergraduate studies at IIT Kanpur. His research has earned him the MIT TR 35 Under 35 Innovator Award (2024) and the Okawa Research Award (2022). With 25+ years of combined AI/robotics experience with his co-founder, Deepak is leading Skild to create robots that can learn and adapt like humans.

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.