Singularity champion Ray Kurzweil's humanoid robot startup to get $100 million in funding

Beyond Imagination, a humanoid robotics startup co-founded by renowned AI futurist Ray Kurzweil and scientist-entrepreneur Harry Kloor, has secured $100 million in Series B funding. 

The investment comes solely from Gauntlet Ventures, which now values the company at $500 million, Reuters reported.

Gauntlet Ventures co-founder Oliver Carmack cited the company's potential to revolutionise US manufacturing and help combat the growing global shortage of skilled labour.

The startup's robot called the Beyond Bot is meant to be deployed in high-demand industrial settings such as factories, pharmaceutical labs, and chip manufacturing plants. The company has been actively testing the robots.

Ray Kurzweil is best known for his prediction of the "singularity" — a future point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins rapidly improving itself. His 2005 essay and book The Singularity Is Near outlined this concept in detail, forecasting that this inflection point would arrive by 2045. 

Though once dismissed as science fiction, the idea has gained mainstream acceptance among technologists and continues to influence AI research and development today.

The field of humanoid robotics is seeing a surge of interest, with tech giants like Tesla, Meta Platforms, and Nvidia joining the race. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced last year that the company's Optimus humanoid robot was making "a lot of progress" and could soon perform routine daily tasks. 

Despite these ambitions, the field has faced significant challenges, particularly in translating advancements in language AI into real-world robotic behavior. A major hurdle remains the development of physical intelligence, requiring vast amounts of real-world training data.

Beyond Imagination is also working on Aura, a universal operating system intended to unify robots, humans, and legacy machinery in intelligent manufacturing environments.