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Rhoda AI

Develops heavy-lifting general-purpose humanoid robots

Research Member of Technical Staff Video Generation Modeling

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/23/2026
No salary listed
Senior, Expert
PhD
Mountain View, CA, USA
In Person
AI & Machine LearningAI Research

About the job

Requirements
  • Strong background in large-scale generative modeling, either video generation (autoregressive video models, diffusion transformers, or causal video architectures) or language model pretraining (large language models or autoregressive transformers at scale).
  • Hands-on experience training large generative models from scratch at scale.
  • Deep understanding of autoregressive modeling, causal architectures, and scaling behavior.
  • Fluency with modern machine learning frameworks; PyTorch is required and JAX is a plus.
  • Ability to design experiments, interpret results, and iterate quickly.
  • Staff-level candidates are expected to define technical direction and drive research strategy independently; senior and Member of Technical Staff candidates execute complex projects with strong fundamentals and growing scope.
Responsibilities
  • Design and train large-scale causal video generation models on web-scale video data.
  • Develop and validate training objectives, model architectures, and data mixtures for video prediction at scale.
  • Research scaling laws and data efficiency for web-scale video pretraining.
  • Investigate which properties of web video transfer most effectively to robotic control and action prediction.
  • Build systematic evaluations to measure video generation quality, long-horizon prediction fidelity, and downstream robot task performance.
  • Run rigorous ablations and benchmarking to understand what drives model quality at scale.
  • Collaborate closely with data and evaluation, post-training, and training systems teams to translate research ideas into working systems.
  • Publish and present work at top-tier machine learning and robotics venues.
Desired Qualifications
  • PhD in machine learning, Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field, or equivalent research or industry experience.
  • Strong publication record at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, or CoRL, especially for the Research Scientist track.
  • Prior work specifically on video generation models, including autoregressive video, diffusion transformers, world models, or causal video architectures.
  • Experience with large-scale autoregressive language model pretraining and scaling.
  • Familiarity with web-scale video datasets and video data curation pipelines.
  • Prior work connecting video generation to control, action prediction, or robotic learning.
  • Familiarity with distributed training and multi-node infrastructure.

About the company

Rhoda AI is building a two-armed humanoid robot designed as a general-purpose bimanual manipulation platform for industrial use. Its product centers on heavy-lifting and complex manipulation in factory and logistics environments, where many humanoid robots struggle. The robot combines dual arms with software and sensors that enable grasping, coordinating with both hands, and performing tasks that require strength and precision in industrial settings. Rhoda AI differentiates itself by targeting heavy-lift capabilities in robotics, a gap for many competitors, supported by a team with deep robotics and AI expertise and substantial funding. The company aims to bring commercially viable humanoid robots to industrial markets, competing with other players in factory automation and logistics robotics, with the goal of transforming how manual work is automated in manufacturing and related sectors.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Series A

Total Funding

$680M

Headquarters

San Jose, California

Founded

2024

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Rhoda raised $450 million in March 2026 at a $1.7 billion valuation.
  • Reuters said investors include Khosla Ventures, Temasek, Mayfield, Premji Invest, and Capricorn.
  • Rhoda says it already works with industrial partners across manufacturing and logistics.

What critics are saying

  • Tesla and Figure AI already dominate humanoid attention, hiring, and customer mindshare.
  • Internet-video training lacks guaranteed factory reliability; one failed pilot can stall deployments in 2026.
  • Without shipping revenue by 2027, Rhoda burns capital before customers trust its platform.

What makes Rhoda AI unique

  • Rhoda trains robots on millions of internet videos, not scarce teleoperation demos.
  • Jagdeep Singh, Gordon Wetzstein, and Vincent Clerc bring rare robotics, optics, and product depth.
  • Rhoda targets industrial heavy-lifting bimanual work, where dexterity and payload matter most.

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Benefits

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Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

-1%

1 year growth

0%

2 year growth

0%
Bloomberg
Mar 10th, 2026
AI robotics startup Rhoda valued at $1.7B after raising $450M to train robots using online videos

Rhoda AI, a startup developing artificial intelligence models trained on publicly available internet videos to direct robots in industrial tasks, has raised $450 million in funding led by Premji Invest. The round values the company at $1.7 billion post-money. The startup's AI model learns from millions of online videos to teach robots to perform various industrial tasks, including in unfamiliar conditions. The approach represents a novel data source for robotics training, aiming to expand robots' capabilities beyond controlled environments.

Forbes
Oct 15th, 2025
These Well-Funded AI Startups Are Building Humanoid Robots In Stealth

Flush with hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding, Rhoda AI and Genesis AI are developing humanoids they hope can go head-to-head with robots from Figure AI and Tesla.