Toyota spinout Walden Robotics emerges with $300 million seed round at $1.1 billion valuation
Walden Robotics, a startup spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January, emerged from stealth on July 15 with a $300 million seed round and an $1.1 billion valuation. The financing was co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, Prologis Ventures and CoreWeave Ventures. The company reached unicorn status in about six months. Led by co-founder and CEO Russ Tedrake, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who previously led TRI’s robotics and machine learning team for nearly a decade, Walden is built on research that includes Diffusion Policy, Universal Manipulation Interface, Large Behavior Models, OpenVLA and the open-source simulator Drake. Its founding team also includes CTO Ben Burchfiel, COO Kerri Fetzer-Borelli, Chief Product Officer Dave Johnson, Chief Strategy Officer Adrien Gaidon, Chief Architect Siyuan Feng and AI lead Rares Ambrus. Walden’s pitch centers on commercializing TRI’s robotics work inside real production environments, starting with Toyota’s manufacturing system. The company says its Large Behavior Models are designed to let robots learn and transfer skills across tasks instead of being programmed one workflow at a time. TRI’s prior research used nearly 1,700 hours of robot data, 1,800 real-world tests and more than 47,000 simulation tests. Walden is combining autonomous operation with remote human assistance as it pushes those systems into factories and warehouses.
