Physical Intelligence, now valued at about $2 billion, aims to create AI models that can power robots.

The artificial intelligence start-up Physical Intelligence, which aims to build general-purpose AI models and algorithms for real-world robots, is set to announce a new $400 million funding round today with backing from Jeff Bezos and other big-name investors. The financing—which has not yet been disclosed on Physical Intelligence’s website but was reported by The New York Times and will reportedly go live today—was led by Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, as well as two venture capital firms, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. The Times reports that the AI giant OpenAI as well as the investment firms Redpoint Ventures and Bond also participated. A spokesperson for Thrive Capital confirmed the details of the Times story to Inc. Physical Intelligence, which has not yet posted about the round on its blog, directed Inc. to that same spokesperson. “The fund-raising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments,” Times reporter Michael J. de la Merced wrote. “That’s significantly more than the $70 million that the start-up, which was founded this year, had raised in seed financing.” Physical Intelligence, also known as Pi and sometimes stylized as π, currently lists five investors on its website: three of the participants in this latest round (Lux Capital, Thrive Capital and OpenAI) and two not named in the Times story (Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital). Data on Crunchbase indicates that those five firms, along with Outset Capital and Greenoaks, constituted Physical Intelligence’s March 2024 seed round. Thrive confirmed to Inc. that they participated in the seed round. Physical Intelligence aims to bring general-use artificial intelligence out into the physical world, according to its website, which features videos of robots folding laundry and assembling cardboard boxes. “What we’re doing is not just a brain for any particular robot,” co-founder and chief executive Karol Hausman told the Times. “It’s a single generalist brain that can control any robot.” Lux Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Bond did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bezos’ family investment office Bezos Expeditions could not be reached, but it does list Physical Intelligence among its portfolio companies. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed their participation in the round. Last month, The Information reported that Physical Intelligence was pursuing a $300 million round at a valuation of about $2 billion.

Unexpected Lessons From 4 Years of Remote Work

It’s been more than four years since the Covid-19 pandemic changed how and where knowledge workers interact with their workplaces. Today, we see a dynamic mix of remote, hybrid, and in-person attendance models, proving that 2020 permanently changed our collective outlook on work, flexibility, and talent. But if there’s anything the past four years have taught us, it’s that the idea that people need to be at an office from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, to be productive is an outdated way of thinking. In fact, recent data reveals only 16 percent of white-collar workers feel they’re more productive in the office, compared to 46 percent who said they’re more productive at home. The shift to remote work proved that geographical differences are not the limitations they once were. Broader geography allows companies to access a wider range of talent, all while meeting talent exactly where they’re at. As the CEO of Oyster, a fully remote company of more than 500 employees in 70 countries, I like to think that we’ve truly mastered the art of remote work—but that didn’t come without learning lessons along the way. Here are five of the best lessons to come out of those years. 1. Remote work is not just about the tools—it’s about the rules, too. In early 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, my co-founder, Jack Mardack, and I had just started our new business: a global employment platform to enable cross-border hiring. While the world was on lockdown, we had to launch, fundraise, and go from no product to a minimum viable product in a matter of months. All during the pandemic; all across two continents; and all over Slack and Zoom. Collaborative tools like Slack, Zoom, Loom, and Notion, helped us stay connected during our company’s infancy. But building the “tools and rules” early on allowed us to create necessary structures and internal cultural norms that are still in place today. As we’ve grown across many time zones, the tools and rules have never been more necessary. For example, we branded our way of working as “follow the sun,” meaning that employees should not feel pressured to work “global hours” just because they work for a “global company.” Prioritizing asynchronous workflows and communication, team members ending their days can hand off work to those starting their days in other parts of the world and trust that it’s being carried forward. This enables teams to be productive no matter the location of their members, helping us collaborate across time zones more effectively, and making it possible for our company to have a 24-hour workday for ultimate customer service around the globe. 2. When it comes to remote, track results, not hours. “It’s easier to trust people are working if we can physically see them working.” How many times have we read headlines, RTO policies, and quotes from business leaders in the past few years that boiled down to this outdated approach to management? Before I became a remote CEO, I’d spent the majority of my working life in offices with leaders who strongly believed that the more employees were physically in seats, the more productive they were. This overreliance on superficial measures of productivity often resulted in missed opportunities, inefficiencies, and work/life imbalances for employees. Remote work has effectively shifted the focus from hours worked to results achieved. This priority shift is a driving force that lends to a more logical and satisfying work approach that’s good for your business and good for your people. As a CEO, it’s not my job to ensure that people are at their desks by 9 a.m. It’s my job to set the vision and overarching business goals for the company. Instead of focusing on how many hours an employee spends on idle in the office messaging app or their number of keystrokes, connect their work to high-level objectives and key results. For example, if you set a company goal of “increasing the share of new business from enterprise companies by 15 percent,” individual teams and departments have a North Star objective that they can track, measure, and work towards. This hasn’t always been my approach, even as a remote CEO. But one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that when you prioritize alignment, productivity tends to follow. 3. Don’t be afraid to adapt your leadership style. Your leadership style isn’t set in stone, even if you’ve been an executive for half of your career. When it came to leading a remote company, adapting my leadership style for a virtual environment was necessary. Early on, I learned that we always need to assume good intent from our people. In a remote setting, it’s easy to become paranoid and feel the need to over-communicate to gain a greater sense of control. The right approach is the opposite: hire talent that aligns with your values and mission and trust them to do their best at all times. To counteract the instinct to micromanage in a remote or hybrid environment, leaders should adopt more supportive and coaching-oriented management styles. Focus more on providing clear objectives and removing obstacles for their teams, rather than hovering and following up with non-stop Slack messages. Manage 1:1’s and updates in a flexible but results-oriented way. Get into the habit of giving continuous feedback so your reports know where they stand and how they’re performing. 4. Remote-first doesn’t mean remote only. There is a popular misconception that remote-first companies have to miss out on the human touchpoints that come with in-person work. One of the most surprising lessons I learned as a remote CEO is how organic these touchpoints can be. While a work environment can be remote-first, it doesn’t—and shouldn’t—mean your organizational culture exists only virtually. At Oyster, meeting people in person is a part of our culture. With colleagues and friends all around the world, you may be surprised by how often our people get together—co-working with colleagues who live in the same city or who are vacationing, or just passing through. Leaders in a fully remote or very distributed company may also find it especially helpful to meet once a year (at least) for executive offsites—both to have the most complex strategic conversations and to build trust within the team While Oyster will always be a fully remote, very distributed company, none of us are limited by the idea that every interaction, connection, and collaboration must be either entirely virtual or entirely in person. 5. Self-discovery meets personal growth. One of the most impactful things I’ve seen come out of the remote work revolution is the opportunity to become the most authentic version of ourselves. Gone are the days of keeping up with office dress codes and social pressures. Remote workers can show up every day exactly as they are, allowing them to explore their personal style and interests more freely. Over the years I’ve worked remotely, I saw the most personal growth—both in and outside of my work. I’ve gleaned a better understanding of my work habits like when I do my best work (at night, after my kids have gone to sleep), as well as my personal strengths and weaknesses. Because if we can altogether reach a deeper level of self-knowledge, we can optimize our work schedules and improve our overall performance and well-being. It’s 2024, and it’s time we all make work work for us. EXPERT OPINION BY TONY JAMOUS, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, OYSTER @JAMINGO

Why Tech Employees Are Ready to Revolt

The last couple of years have been a shitshow for anyone who works in tech or at a tech-adjacent company. And it’s coming to a head. But before the revolution gets underway, we should look at how we got here. This will be short, but feel free to dive down any of the associated rabbit holes. Where to Begin? If I have to pick a starting point—the match on the dumpster fire, so to speak—I’d pick the period just after the period after the pandemic, so let’s call that mid-2022. That was when the free and cheap money started drying up, putting both the consumer and the venture crowd in an immediate pinch. This hit tech startups the hardest, and the earlier the stage of the startup, the harder you were hit. Here’s why. Startups, especially tech startups, have always existed in two different worlds, and they might as well be on two entirely different planets. One is Jupiter, a big gas giant with a storm that’s been raging for centuries. This is the world of unicorns, West Coast VCs, and people leaving Google or Amazon only to fail quickly and then go back to Google or Amazon. The other is Pluto, which is small and dark and icy. You hardly hear about what happens on Pluto, but a lot of entrepreneurs are happy there and making a decent living, sometimes becoming quite successful, but quietly. Now, I know it’s like this because I’ve built or been a part of several startups on both planets. And I can tell you, they have always been far apart, but when the cheap money dried up in 2022, they drifted even further apart. Once AI entered the mainstream in 2023, Jupiter got bigger and closer to the sun and everyone wanted to live there. Those of us on Pluto shrugged. More space for us. But then the gulf between the two became wider and wider, and suddenly Pluto wasn’t technically even a planet anymore. It happened fast. I stopped writing because it was changing so fast, I couldn’t keep up. When I started writing again, my once-optimistic take on the future became a cautionary tale, and reading those pieces again now, I was kind of spot-on about the reasons why: the tech industry taking the customer for granted, the infatuation with AI, and the money—across the tech landscape—losing its taste for innovation and instead hopping on any bandwagon it could find. As always, change, good and bad, impacts the startup world(s) first, then it comes for big tech. The Artificial Elephant in The Room Yes, I could blame AI for 99 percent of the problems in the tech industry right now. But also, I can’t help but feel like AI is a symptom here and not a cause. When I said that scared money was “hopping on any bandwagon” in the last section, I probably could have said “hopping on the AI bandwagon.” Now look, do not get me wrong. I helped start this fire, and I am not a Luddite or reformed nerd in any sense. I just know that when these major technical tectonic shifts happen, well, people go nuts. I’m old enough to have lived through a couple of these, starting with the capital “I” Internet, and we react to that tectonic shift the same way every time so, ultimately, we are the problem. By that, I mean that AI is neither savior nor villain. It’s not the answer for everything, and it’s not going to have us bowing to our AI overlords any time soon. But opportunists on either side won’t let nuance stop them from profiting. And the rewards and risks with AI are so big and so high that the natural amplification of advancement in the tech is deafening. This is crushing tech workers in two ways. It’s turning them into villains. And, oddly enough, the vilification is bouncing off of the Sam Altmans and the Elon Musks and landing squarely on to the unsuspecting head of Jane Programmer. Jane Programmer is increasingly being seen as expendable, regardless of what she does or how much experience or talent she has. We hate you now. And also, you’re fired. Doomsday Prepping for a Day That May Never Come So… tech companies are cutting tech employees across the board, and it’s almost like a fire sale in reverse. It’s so cheap and no one is going to know. So why not just pull the trigger? Did rampant over-hiring happen in the cheap money era? Absolutely. Will those folks be missed? Some of them. Most of them? Eh. Can AI do the work of all kinds of tech workers and maybe hundreds of them at once? Not now. Could it someday? People are saying there’s a chance. Hey, can we do this layoff thing surreptitiously by requiring everyone to come back to the office, even if it means our newly hired CEO will have to get on a private jet every week? Pregnant pause. And then you wake up one day and realize there is a consensus building that AI can do everything. Everything from your job to your co-worker’s job to the job of the person who is supposed to be buying the thing you work on. Then AI can hire all the replacements, and only the ones it needs. You realize this is not true, this is just another greater fool theory. But it takes so much nuance to explain why that you just shrug. You don’t have the time. You need to figure out what’s next for you. And quick. I have the time. Well, I don’t, but I write fast. And now that we’re on the same page, please follow me as I document what happens next, starting with the Great Tech Worker Revolution of… 2025? EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO