YZi Labs Leads $52M Round in RoboForce to Build the Future of Physical AI Robo-Labor, Spotlighted by NVIDIA

Key Takeaways: 

• YZi Labs led a $52M round in RoboForce, a pioneer in the next generation of AI Robotics systems – underscoring the fund’s accelerating momentum within the robotics sector and Physical AI.
• RoboForce is a full-stack Physical AI robotics company – deploying its TITAN platform for the most demanding industrial jobs (solar, data center, shipping, mining, manufacturing and more) with 11,000+ robot orders via LOI, deep NVIDIA collaboration, and a compounding AI data flywheel built for scale.
• Ella Zhang, Managing Partner and Head of YZi Labs, joined RoboForce as board director. 

March 16 – YZi Labs today announced it has led a $52 million funding round in RoboForce, a Silicon Valley–based AI robotics company building Physical AI–powered robotic labor systems (“Robo-Labor”) for demanding industrial environments. RoboForce was spotlighted by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at GTC, and is deploying its flagship TITAN robot to address critical labor shortages across renewable energy, next-gen AI infrastructure, natural resources. 

This investment marks YZi Labs' accelerating momentum in robotics and solidifies its long-term thesis on the evolution of Physical AI. For years, the fund has backed the infrastructure of the digital economy; now, it’s also backing the AI infrastructure and Biotechnology that will build and maintain the human future.

The Challenge Measured in Heat and Delays

When Ella Zhang, Head of YZi Labs, and Jing Xiong, AI Investment Director of YZi Labs, first met RoboForce Co-founders Leo Ma and Calvin Zhou at a Bay Area founders gathering, they were intrigued that the direction Roboforce was building was exactly what they were looking for .

In the summer of 2025, Ma was standing on a solar farm outside Phoenix, Arizona, where the ground was hot enough to cook an egg. He watched workers traverse uninhabitable terrain for hours, securing millions of solar panels under a punishing sun. 

Over the years, Ma has visited hundreds of factories — from chip fabrication plants to underground drilling sites — and each time, he came to the same conclusion: "These are the jobs that we shouldn't need people to do anymore."

In 2024, an estimated 53 gigawatts of U.S. solar projects were delayed because of worker shortages and long waits for equipment. The industries that build our world — energy, logistics, mining, data centers — are facing a persistent and growing labor gap. The work is physically demanding, repetitive, and safety-critical. The workers willing and able to do it are increasingly scarce.

Ma calls this the gap "between industrial growth and human availability." The purpose of RoboForce is to close it.

TITAN: A New Class of Industrial Labor

RoboForce flagship system, TITAN, is a Physical AI-enabled robot designed to work in precisely these conditions, with millimeter-level accuracy and the industrial-grade endurance needed to sustain high-output workflows.

The company was founded in 2023 by a team assembled from the most demanding engineering environments in the world: Carnegie Mellon University, University of Michigan, Amazon Robotics, Google, Waymo, Cruise, Tesla Robotics, ABB, and Apple. Ma himself spent years building autonomous driving software at Baidu before he co-founded CYNGN, an automated driving company that Ma helped bring public. As he puts it, "Building AI robotics is all I do."

RoboForce’s approach is built around what they call the Physical AI data flywheel: every robot deployed in the field generates real-world operational data, which feeds back into their foundation model, which makes the next generation of robots smarter and more capable. It is a compounding system designed for the breadth of industrial challenges ahead.

"Building a Robo-Labor system is the heart of the work, but physical AI does not scale overnight," Leo Ma says. "The more you use it, the smarter it gets, and spinning that data flywheel requires patient, generational capital. We deliberately chose YZi Labs as a partner who understands infrastructure timelines and is willing to bet on a long-term business. This is about the future for all of us."

From the Field to Nvidia’s GTC Keynote

In October 2025, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at GTC Washington, D.C., and highlighted RoboForce's TITAN robot as a breakthrough. Huang articulated the broader thesis in his keynote: "AI is transforming the world's factories into intelligent thinking machines — the engines of a new industrial revolution."

RoboForce has received letters of intent representing demand for over 11,000 robots and is actively transitioning from pilot deployments to production-scale rollouts. The GTC spotlight was a validation of a thesis that they’ve been proving in the field.

In fact, RoboForce is already building this platform in deep collaboration with NVIDIA, leveraging NVIDIA Jetson Thor at the edge, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for simulation and robot learning, NVIDIA Cosmos for synthetic data generation, and NVIDIA OSMO for cloud-to-edge orchestration. The partnership is a bet on the most powerful AI computing infrastructure available to accelerate the pace of learning and deployment.

Four Reasons YZi Labs Led This Round

"When we met the team and saw the demo, it clicked," said Jing Xiong. "These robots are doing the work humans were never meant to endure. And the precision spoke for itself: 1mm accuracy, achieved by RoboForce’s robot foundation model well beyond standard ML. We knew this was a team that could execute."

Overall, YZi Labs’ decision to lead this round is built on four main structural pillars:

An execution-obsessed founder. Ma is a builder who understands how to deploy complex autonomous systems into unpredictable environments. His conviction is shaped by hundreds of industrial site visits and a deep commitment to solving the challenges facing today’s workforce.

Engineering depth that compounds. RoboForce has assembled a rare cross-disciplinary team — PhDs spanning control systems, robotics, perception, and mechanical engineering — whose combined methods produce results no single discipline could. Every deployment feeds real-world data back into their models, making the entire fleet smarter at scale.

A market pulling the product in. The industrial workforce shortage is an active, multi-billion-dollar bottleneck capping economic progress. With demand already validated across utility-scale solar, logistics, and mining, RoboForce is targeting a vast, highly lucrative market with customers eager to pay for performance today.

The inflection point of Embodied AI. The convergence of edge computing, scalable simulation, and advanced reasoning models has closed the notorious "demo-to-real" gap. RoboForce is positioned exactly where this technological wave meets the physical world.

Ella Zhang, Managing Partner and Head of YZi Labs, joined the board of the company. "RoboForce is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in how machines interact with the world," said Ella Zhang. "I am thrilled to join the board and work closely with the leadership team to scale their Physical AI capabilities. This is beyond a financial investment; it's a partnership built on the shared belief that the next frontier of AI will be defined by its impact on the physical plane."

What Comes Next

The capital from this round intends to accelerate RoboForce's execution across three pillars: advancing their robot foundation model and AI data flywheel; scaling manufacturing and their Physical AI robot platform; and driving commercialization, converting active pilot programs into production deployments.

For YZi Labs, this is the beginning of a broader commitment to Physical AI. It has always believed that the best investments are in founders who are solving problems they cannot stop thinking about. In Ma and the RoboForce team, it found that and more: a world-class team, a sharp and defensible thesis, and a mission that matters.

YZi Labs is excited to partner with RoboForce. The work of building a safer, more productive world is now accelerating.

About YZi Labs

YZi Labs manages over $10 billion in assets globally. Our investment philosophy emphasizes impact first—we believe that meaningful returns will naturally follow. We invest in ventures at every stage, prioritizing those with solid fundamentals in Web3, AI, and biotech.

YZi Labs’ portfolio covers over 300 projects from over 25 countries across six continents. Some notable portfolios include Trustwallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, Safepal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster, XAI, and more. More than 65 of YZi Labs’ portfolio companies have gone through our incubation programs. For more information, follow YZi Labs on X. 

About Roboforce

RoboForce is building the future of Physical AI — scalable, deployable Robo-Labor designed for demanding industrial environments. Founded in 2023 by experts from CMU, UMich, Amazon Robotics, Google, Waymo, Cruise, Tesla Robotics, ABB, and Apple. 

RoboForce is backed by YZi Labs, Myron Scholes, Gary Rieschel, Jerry Yang, Carnegie Mellon University, and beyond. To learn more about RoboForce, visit roboforce.ai.

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