Rhoda AI raises $450M Series A at $1.7B for robot foundation models

The round was announced on March 10, 2026, alongside Rhoda's public launch and its FutureVision model. Reports differ on the lead: SiliconANGLE names Premji Invest, while a TBPN digest credits Khosla Ventures. Other backers include Capricorn, Mayfield, Temasek, Leitmotif, Matter Venture Partners, Prelude, Xora and John Doerr. CEO Jagdeep Singh previously led QuantumScape to a public listing. Rhoda pretrains on hundreds of millions of videos. It then fine-tunes with teleoperation data, and the company says a new task can take about ten hours. It describes this as a Direct Video Action approach, which predicts future video and converts it into actions, adjusting every few hundred milliseconds. Rhoda contrasts this with vision-language-action models, which it says need far more robot data. It reports tests with an automotive company and plans to license the model to hardware partners. For founders, the round shows investors will fund a very large first check for a team with a distinct data strategy and no public product history. Robotics startups that depend on costly teleoperation data now face a rival claiming a data requirement orders of magnitude lower. The claim comes from the company and has not been independently verified.