Venture Capital Bets on the Intelligence Layer Over the Robot

What the March unicorn data establishes is not enthusiasm for robots — it is a consensus that the replicable, scalable asset in physical AI is the model, not the machine ^[3][4]. Hardware depreciates; a foundation model that generalizes across robot form factors does not. Physical Intelligence's captures exactly this logic: investors are pricing the pi0 model as a platform, the same way GPT-4 was priced as infrastructure rather than a product.