Amazon, Nvidia Help Fund Dyna Robotics’ $120M Series A Round
For Dyna Robotics, ‘A’ is for automation.
The California -based startup announced Monday that it has secured $120 million in Series A funding.
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Robostrategy, CRB and First Round Capital led the round, with further participation from Salesforce Ventures, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund , Samsung Next, LG Technology Ventures and NVentures, which is Nvidia ’s venture capital arm.
Dyna creates robotic foundation models, which it inputs into general-purpose robots. Foundation models are typically trained on mass amounts of data and information, but lack the training for a specific use case; that in mind, Dyna’s robots use the knowledge the foundation model has been trained on to adapt to real-world scenarios.
Jason Ma, co-founder of Dyna and former DeepMind research scientist, said that flexibility gives Dyna the opportunity to enter many industries without having to train robots to handle each and every task a customer wishes to deploy them for.
“Our first principle is to design robot foundation models that attain both generalization and performance,” Ma said in a statement. “Scalable real-world robot learning systems need to master and generalize many manipulation skills. To achieve the best performance on complex tasks, Dyna’s foundation models are developed to enable general world understanding while learning from the models’ own experience for rapid online learning.”
The company plans to use its Series A capital to add heads to its research and engineering teams and to fasttrack the further refinement of its foundation model as it adds commercial clients to its roster.
Lindon Gao, co-founder and CEO of Dyna, said that kind of improvement will be key to proving that autonomous robots are a high-fidelity use case for industries that have previously struggled to find the promised value associated with autonomous solutions.
“A strong foundation model is key to scalable distribution,” Gao said in a statement. “Our models continuously improve with each customer deployment, generating high-quality data. We are observing true generalization as our robot enters new environments; it simply works out of the box, with no additional data.”
About a month after securing a $23.5 million seed round in the spring, Dyna announced that it had launched Dynamism v1 (DYNA-1), which is the foundation model that currently powers its stationary robotic arms. Because the robots leverage DYNA-1, they’re considered general-purpose robots and can learn new skills as they go.
In early tests with customers, Dyna’s robots have focused on high-dexterity tasks, like folding napkins. The company said in April that DYNA-1 has a 99.4 percent success rate without human intervention when operating at 60 percent of a typical human’s throughput for the same task.
For Dyna, which said its robots can operate for more than 24 hours at a time, that means the machines can operate autonomously while humans are off the clock. So, while the robots may take more time to handle a task than their human counterparts, they can operate while humans are away from a facility.
York Yang, co-founder of Dyna, said that capability bodes well in industries seeing labor shortages.
“Right now, three forces are colliding at once: AI breakthroughs are maturing, hardware is accelerating and the demand for labor has never been higher. That convergence has created a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said co-founder York Yang. “Dyna has made rapid progress over 12 months and we believe our ultimate goal, achieving physical AGI [artificial general intelligence], is not far off.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization (QSPC), 20.4 percent of industry-agnostic U.S. manufacturers attributed the gap between actual operations and full production capacity to insufficient supply of labor. And, according to Manpower’s annual U.S. Talent Shortage Report, 74 percent of U.S. transportation and logistics employers said they struggle to find skilled talent; that figure has increased by 6 percentage points since 2024’s survey, and the sector’s rate comes in 3 percentage points higher than the industry-agnostic U.S. average.
Experts have attributed some supply chain players’ increasing interest in robotics to their labor shortage problems. Deloitte research shows that autonomous robots can decrease labor costs while growing productivity rates, primarily because they can work constantly without needing breaks in the way humans do. Investors seem to agree; Andrew Kang, CEO of RoboStrategy, said Dyna’s vision for changing multiple industries propelled its continued investment in the startup.
“Dyna’s team and mission bridges research excellence and real world commercial applications. The demand for robotic automation spans almost every industry, and we believe Dyna will be at the forefront in meeting it with their state of the art general-purpose robot foundation model,” Kang said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to co-lead this Series A and support the team’s ambitious roadmap of driving mass adoption of general-purpose robots.”
