Free web video matched robot-lab data in Runway's own test, and the weights ship free
Runway's Praxis-1, now running on Standard Bots' RO1 arm, matched the placement accuracy of far costlier teleoperated robot data using ordinary web video, and Runway will release the weights openly. The claim lands on Skild AI's $14 billion valuation, the highest mark in robot foundation models.
Vincent Jiang · 2 min read
A free brain on a Long Island arm
Standard Bots, a Glen Cove, New York robot maker that just raised a $200M Series C at a $1B valuation, is running its RO1 arm under a brain it did not build 12. Runway, best known for AI video generation, says its first open-weight robot policy, Praxis-1, is now steering that arm, plus two-handed rigs at Noble Machines and a mobile base at Ultra, ahead of a public release "in the coming months" 1. When it ships, the trained weights download for nothing 1.
The test that prices teleop data at zero
The money claim is one line of arithmetic. After finetuning, a policy pretrained on ordinary web video placed objects 16.1 cm from target, against 16.0 cm for one pretrained on teleoperated robot video, a gap Runway itself calls statistically meaningless across 93 evaluation pairs 1. Teleoperation is the expensive asset in the field; Skild, the best-capitalized lab in it, says collecting enough demonstrations for one long task runs 50 to 100 hours 3. The scarce asset in robotics turned out to be free.
The marks resting on the moat
Skild raised $300M at a $1.5B valuation in 2024 with Amazon and SoftBank in the round, was rumored at $4.5B with NVIDIA and Samsung a year later, and in January 2026 raised about $1.4B led by SoftBank at a valuation above $14B 45. By its own count it now books a $100M revenue run rate, 10 months after its first commercial deployment, across more than 60 sites, including dual-arm Blackwell assembly with Foxconn inside an NVIDIA plant in Houston 67.
Skild's valuation climbed from $1.5B to over $14B in 18 months
- Estimate
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Series A, 2024 | $1.5B |
| Series B, 2025 (rumored) (estimate) | $4.5B |
| Jan 2026 round | $14B |
Both camps grade their own homework
The twist is that Skild is not defending teleop data either. Its new S1 learns an unseen ten-minute task from a single video, at 66% per-step success against 9% for a language-prompted rival, and its data engine already mixes web video with simulation and teleoperation 36. Every number in this fight is the seller's own: Runway's evidence covers one placement task, its license terms are undisclosed, and no independent evaluation exists 8. NVIDIA's product lead for autonomous machines calls data and evaluation the field's real bottleneck 7.
What to watch: the license and the download
Standard Bots sells arms from $29,500 and upsells its own demonstration-trained AI platform 2; a frontier brain at zero license fee sells arms and squeezes that upsell. The same squeeze runs toward Teradyne's Universal Robots, which has placed more than 100,000 cobots on the promise of easy programming 9. When the weights actually download, the proof moves from Runway's own post to other people's benches.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
