Karol Hausman

He grew up in a small town in Poland, and watching Star WarsStar WarsStar Wars is a space-fantasy film and entertainment franchise created by George Lucas and now owned by Lucasfilm, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.Open the full entry as a child sparked his fascination with robots.⁠[1]

He received an MEng from Warsaw University of Technology in 2012 and an MS from the Technical University of Munich in 2013.⁠[2]

He said he only realized he could work on intelligent robots after starting his master’s in Munich, when he stumbled into a lab and “saw two human-size humanoid robots making popcorn!”⁠[3]

From August 2013 to May 2018 he pursued a PhD in computer science at the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry under Gaurav Sukhatme.⁠[4]

During his doctorate he applied twice for a GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry internship and was rejected both times, interning instead at DeepMind in London.⁠[3]

In June 2018 he joined Google Brain, becoming a senior research scientist in October 2020 and a staff research scientist in October 2022; he has described himself as its robot manipulation lead.⁠[4]

He later served as a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind while also holding an adjunct professorship at Stanford University.⁠[5]

In August 2022 he and Brian IchterBrian IchterBrian Ichter is a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher and a co-founder of Physical Intelligence, a company building foundation models for robots. He was previously a research scientist at Google Brain and Google DeepMind, where he worked on robotics research including SayCan and RT-2.Open the full entry, both research scientists on the Google Research Brain Team, published a blog post introducing PaLM-SayCan, an approach that grounds a large language model’s understanding of instructions in the actions a robot can actually perform, its affordances.⁠[6]

In July 2023 Google DeepMind introduced RT-2, a model that translates vision and language into robot actions; he is listed among its co-authors in the acknowledgements.⁠[7]

In January 2024 he and Sergey LevineSergey LevineSergey Levine is a computer scientist and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley who works on deep reinforcement learning and robot learning, co-developed algorithms such as Soft Actor-Critic and Conservative Q-Learning, and in 2024 co-founded the robot foundation model company Physical Intelligence.Open the full entry wrote in IEEE Spectrum about the RT-X project, which pooled robot data from 34 labs to train general-purpose robot models: “The RT-X project shows what is possible when the robot-learning community acts together.”⁠[8]

In March 2024 Physical Intelligence, with him as co-founder and chief executive, emerged publicly, aiming to bring artificial intelligence into the physical world through a universal model.⁠[9]

That month the company raised a $70 million seed round led by Thrive Capital.⁠[10]

In November 2024 Physical Intelligence raised $400 million in a round led by Jeff BezosJeff BezosJeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded Amazon in 1994, led it as chief executive for many years, and became its executive chair in 2021. He also founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin, bought The Washington Post in 2013, and set up philanthropic funds including the Bezos Earth Fund.Open the full entry, Thrive Capital and Lux CapitalLux CapitalLux Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Josh Wolfe and Robert Paull, with offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Focused on emerging science and technology, the firm backs companies in fields including life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, aerospace and defense through fund investments and by helping to found companies.Open the full entry, with OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, Redpoint and Bond participating, at a post-money valuation of about $2.4 billion.⁠[10]

PitchBook data put the valuation at about $2 billion.⁠[11]

In April 2025 he was among the speakers at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) event “Robotics in a Human-Centered World: Innovations and Implications.”⁠[12]

In November 2025 Physical Intelligence raised $600 million in a round led by CapitalG with Lux Capital, at a valuation of about $5.6 billion, bringing its total funding to about $1.1 billion.⁠[13]

In March 2026 Physical Intelligence was in talks to raise about $1 billion at a valuation of more than $11 billion, with Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry expected to take part; the deal was still under negotiation at the time.⁠[14]

In July 2026 a post on X by tech blogger Robert Scoble claiming that AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry was acquiring Physical Intelligence set off widespread speculation; Hausman then wrote to employees in a Slack message that the reports were not true. The two companies had held acquisition talks that spring, but no acquisition was completed.⁠[15]

In October 2026 Physical Intelligence opened an API beta for robot model training and inference, with access granted by application and teams onboarded in batches; early user Almond reached its deburring task after four days of iterating with the API.⁠[16]

He has argued that robotics has been bottlenecked on intelligence rather than hardware, saying that “the only answer to generalization that we know in machine learning is through diversity of data.”⁠[17]