Walden Robotics has emerged from stealth with $300 million in seed funding and a $1.1 billion valuation, unveiling an industrial robotics platform that deliberately breaks from the humanoid playbook.
The funding round was co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital, with participation from Nvidia, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, CoreWeave Ventures, Prologis Ventures and several others.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, which spun out of the Toyota Research Institute in January, develops general-purpose robots designed for manufacturing and logistics environments.
Rather than building fully bipedal humanoids, Walden equips its robots with a humanoid upper body mounted on a wheeled mobile base, arguing the design is better suited to factory work.
Unlike many robotics startups focused on creating walking humanoids, Walden said its design prioritizes safety, endurance and deployability. Wheeled robots can stop more predictably around people, meet existing industrial safety requirements more easily and accommodate larger batteries and onboard computing systems than legged machines.
The company’s robots are powered by large behavior models (LBMs), an emerging class of AI systems designed to enable robots to acquire new skills through experience and adapt to different tasks.
According to the company, its robots have been operating in production at a Toyota manufacturing plant in North America since February, moving from an initial pilot to production work in less than two months. Walden said it is also working with customers across the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, electronics, logistics and life sciences industries.
“Core advances in Physical AI, and all of the excitement and attention surrounding it, has made disruptive change possible,” said Russ Tedrake, Walden co-founder and former senior vice president of LBMs at Toyota Research Institute, in a press release. “But providing real value to customers and building a robust and scalable business requires a deep understanding and respect for how manufacturing is done today.”
Walden enters an increasingly crowded physical AI market, where startups including Figure, Apptronik and Agility Robotics are racing to commercialize general-purpose humanoids.
Rather than pursuing human-like mobility, however, Walden is betting that factories will value practical deployment over anthropomorphic design, with continuous learning capabilities taking priority over walking on two legs.