We’ve raised $80 million in Series A funding, co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, with continued participation from Conviction, Abstract, A*, and Grant Gordon. This brings our total raised to over $100 million. We started Watney by asking a simple question -- what can a robot enable in industries where the work remains valuable on an infinite horizon? We found an answer in the fundamental inputs to civilization: energy, matter, and intelligence. A robot will never be as charming as a barista or as personable as a housekeeper, but it can be more exacting than a surgeon. And, a breakthrough in one quickly becomes the capability of millions. We don’t imitate human motions or processes. We care about the new, differentiated capabilities robots can unlock. We work on problems where our choice of embodiment gives us an order of magnitude advantage, whether through precision, reliability, or scale. Compute is just beginning to transform society, but it’s constrained by execution. Since 2025, Watney has been serving the largest hyperscalers in the world, helping accelerate their compute rollout through an end-to-end deployment model. Across hundreds of thousands of hours in customer facilities, our systems have achieved more than four nines of reliability. They’ve enabled our customers to build data centers faster, at larger scales, and with more ambitious architectures. Today, we operate the largest fleet of dexterous robots running 24/7/365 across the United States. This is all to say, it's an exciting time at Watney. We’re all here because we want to see more ambition in the physical world. We are hiring across all domains. Join us.

I’ve been asked several times whether Zhilin Yang, the founder of @Kimi_Moonshot was my PhD student. The answer is yes and he is absolutely brilliant. But I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with so many outstanding PhD students over the years. So I thought I’d brag a little about them and their career paths (of course there are also many MSc and undergraduate students, sorry if I missed anyone): Founders / Founding Team Members Devendra Chaplot @dchaplot PhD, Founding Member Thinking Machines / Mistral Zhilin Yang PhD, Founder & CEO, Moonshot AI Jimmy Ba @jimmybajimmyba MSc/PhD, Co-founder xAI Hubert Tsai PhD, Co-founder Spuree, Apple Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines; Co-founder Vayu Robotics Charlie Tang PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines, DE Shaw. Professors Paul Liang @pliang279 PhD, MIT Ben Eysenbach @ben_eysenbach PhD, Princeton University Ruosong Wang @RuosongW PhD, Peking University Bhuwan Dhingra @bhuwandhingra PhD, Duke University Roger Grosse @RogerGrosse Postdoc, University of Toronto Alexander Schwing Postdoc, UIUC Research Scientists Shuyan Zhou @shuyanzh36, Postdoc, Meta Superintelligence Lab Tiffany Min @SoYeonTiffMin PhD, Microsoft AI Murtaza Dalal @mihdalal PhD, Tesla AI Minji Yoon @MinjiYoon90 , PhD, Microsoft AI Shrimai Prabhumoye PhD, NVIDIA AI, Mistral Haitian Sun @sun_haitian PhD, Google DeepMind Emilio Parisotto PhD, Google DeepMind Lisa Lee PhD @rl_agent, Google DeepMind Manzil Zaheer @ManzilZaheer PhD, Google DeepMind Jamie Kiros PhD, Google Brain, OpenAI Yuri Burda PhD, OpenAI, Anthropic Cody Severinski PhD, Amazon