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ByNN Desk
Leo Ma’s RoboForce Grabs $52M for Hazardous Job Bots
RoboForce, a California-based industrial robotics startup, raised $52 million in an oversubscribed funding round, bringing its total capital to $67 million.
The oversubscribed round brings total funding of RoboForce to $67 million and accelerates the commercial deployment of autonomous machines in high-risk industrial environments.
RoboForce, a California-based industrial robotics startup, raised $52 million in an oversubscribed funding round, bringing its total capital to $67 million. The company announced on March 16, 2026.
YZi Labs, a $10 billion fund, led the round. Jerry Yang, co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo, joined as a new investor alongside existing backers Myron Scholes, Gary Rieschel, and Carnegie Mellon University.
The proceeds will fund development of RoboForce’s next-generation robotics foundation model, expand manufacturing of its general-purpose physical AI robots, and support the transition from pilot programs to full commercial deployment.
The move comes as operators across utility-scale solar, data centers, mining, logistics, and global shipping face a widening gap between the available pool of human labor and the physically demanding, safety-critical work. RoboForce positions its platform, called Robo-Labor, as a direct response to that shortage.
At the core of the platform is a robotics foundation model paired with a stack of physical AI agents. Those agents process real-world sensor data and coordinate robot behavior across unpredictable environments. Deployed robots feed operational data back into the system, where it combines with high-fidelity simulation to refine performance over successive deployments.
RoboForce confirmed it is building its AI infrastructure in collaboration with NVIDIA. Edge computing runs on NVIDIA Jetson Thor. Simulation and robot learning rely on NVIDIA Isaac Sim and NVIDIA Isaac Lab. Synthetic data generation uses NVIDIA Cosmos, and cloud-to-edge orchestration runs on NVIDIA OSMO. These tools create a continuous data loop that accelerates policy learning and scales deployment in demanding industrial settings.
RoboForce was founded in 2023 by Leo Ma and Calvin Zhou. The company draws engineering talent from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Michigan, Amazon Robotics, Google, Waymo, Cruise, Tesla Robotics, ABB, and Apple.
It is unclear when RoboForce expects to convert its active pilots into full-production contracts, or which industrial sectors will see deployment first. The company did not disclose revenue figures or a timeline for profitability in its announcement.
The raise follows sustained investor interest in physical AI and humanoid robotics. Several competitors, including Figure AI and Apptronik, secured nine-figure rounds in 2024 and 2025 as manufacturers sought alternatives to tightening labor markets.
Disclaimer: This article is based on a press release shared by RoboForce as a company update. NervNow has not independently verified the claims and figures cited.
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