Walden Robotics, a startup spun out of Toyota’s robotics research lab, emerged from stealth on July 15 with $300 million in seed funding and a $1.1 billion valuation, the company announced.
Toyota and Nvidia among the backers
The round was co-led by Toyota — through its venture and research arms — and Deviation Capital, with additional money from Nvidia, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, CoreWeave Ventures and more than a dozen other investors, according to Walden’s announcement. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company was founded in January 2026 by Russ Tedrake, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who previously served as senior vice president of Large Behavior Models at Toyota Research Institute, along with colleagues from TRI, MIT, Stanford and Amazon.
From lab to factory floor
Walden builds its own hardware, software and AI models for general-purpose robots aimed at manufacturing and logistics tasks that remain hard to automate, such as loading, sorting and material handling. According to the company, its wheeled, arm-equipped machines have been working production shifts at a Toyota plant in North America since February, alongside human employees, for eight hours at a time. Walden says the robots run on what it calls “Large Behavior Models” that let them keep improving through real-world practice instead of being programmed for one fixed task.
Part of a wider robotics funding wave
The launch follows a run of large robotics deals this year, including Nvidia’s push to bring Japanese manufacturers into its robotics platform, as well-funded humanoid robot startups race to move machines out of demos and onto real production lines. Deviation Capital’s Colin Beirne said in the announcement that “advances in AI are making a new generation of adaptable robots possible, and Walden sits right at the center of that shift.”
Walden has not disclosed pricing for its robots, and its performance claims have not yet been independently verified outside the pilot at Toyota.