---
title: 'Business Operations at Physical Intelligence'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-physical-intelligence-san-francisco-1w94kbx47gq1'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Business Operations at Physical Intelligence

- **Company:** Physical Intelligence
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-02-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/physicalintelligence/c2c1faae-acb6-4c8b-bd0d-e7e180ac8d94/application

**Skills:** Analytical skills, Strategic thinking, Written communication, Verbal communication, Financial fluency, Contract negotiation, Vendor management, Infrastructure management, Consulting experience, Venture capital experience, Private equity experience, Finance experience, Startup scaling experience, Cross-border project experience

> This role involves independently identifying and executing high-leverage business problems across partnerships, operations, infrastructure, and deployment. The candidate will drive data, compute, and infrastructure partnerships while supporting internal scaling initiatives and external communications to support the...

## Job description

## Who We Are

Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world. We are a group of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically-actuated devices of the future. As the company scales, success increasingly depends not just on research excellence, but on strong business execution - across partnerships, operations, infrastructure, and deployment. Success in this role looks like independently identifying the highest-leverage problems, structuring them into executable plans, and driving them to measurable outcomes with minimal founder involvement. The Team This role sits close to the founders and works cross-functionally with research, engineering, operations, finance, legal, and external partners. There is no single “lane”, the mandate is to add leverage wherever the company most needs it. In This Role You Will

- Own and execute cross-functional projects with high ambiguity and real business impact.
- Drive data, compute, and infrastructure partnerships, from sourcing through negotiation and management.
- Plug into deployment efforts: sourcing opportunities, structuring contracts, pricing, and operational setup.
- Assist with and drive internal scaling initiatives such as office expansion, international operations, and company planning.
- Support investor, board, and external communications including decks, analyses, and prep.
- Act as an execution arm for founders and leaders, translating priorities into outcomes.

## What We Hope You’ll Bring

- Strong analytical and strategic instincts with a bias toward action.
- Comfort operating independently in ambiguous environments.
- Commercial mindset and basic financial fluency (contracts, pricing, tradeoffs).
- Exceptional written and verbal communication.
- Willingness to do anything, paired with strong prioritization instincts and comfort pushing back when work is low-leverage.
- Strong π-fit: respect for research and engineering culture, curiosity, and intellectual humility. Bonus Points If You Have
- Background in consulting, venture capital, private equity, or finance.
- Experience negotiating vendor, data, or infrastructure agreements.
- Exposure to startups that have scaled quickly or inflected suddenly.
- International operations or cross-border project experience.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

## About Physical Intelligence

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Physical Intelligence is building general-purpose AI foundation models that can control any robot to perform any physical task, aiming to bring the flexibility of large language models into the physical world.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A/B stage; total funding $1.07B across multiple rounds)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley), Chelsea Finn (Stanford), Karol Hausman (CEO, ex-Google DeepMind), Lachy Groom (ex-Stripe), Quan Vuong (ex-Google DeepMind), Brian Ichter, and Adnan Esmail

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics foundation models / Artificial Intelligence / Research Services
- **Target customers**: B2B enterprise – logistics, grocery, manufacturing, and other verticals requiring physical automation (currently testing with a small number of partners)
- **Mission**: “Bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world” – developing learning algorithms and foundation models to power robots and other physically-actuated devices

## Products & Services
- **π0 (pi-zero)**: First generalist policy released in October 2024; a vision-language-action (VLA) model capable of dexterous multi-task robot control. Open-sourced in February 2025.
- **π0.5**: VLA with open-world generalization (April 2025); can control a mobile manipulator to clean unfamiliar kitchens or bedrooms.
- **π0.7**: Steerable robotic foundation model with emergent capabilities (April 2026); can control a new robot platform without additional training.
- **π*0.6**: VLA trained with reinforcement learning to improve success rate and throughput on real-world tasks (November 2025).
- **FAST**: Efficient robot action tokenizer enabling 5x faster training of generalist policies (January 2025).
- **Multi-Scale Embodied Memory (MEM)**: Gives models long- and short-term memory for tasks exceeding ten minutes (March 2026).
- All offerings are research-stage models; the company does not currently sell a commercial product but partners with select companies for testing.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $5.6 billion (as of January 2026, per TechCrunch)
- **Total Funding**: $1.07 billion across four rounds:
  - Seed (March 2024): $70M led by Lux Capital and Thrive Capital
  - Series A (November 2024): $400M led by Lux Capital and Thrive Capital
  - Venture Round (November 2025): $600M from 8 investors
  - Venture Round (March 2026): undisclosed amount from 4 investors
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, OpenAI, CapitalG, Redpoint Ventures, Bond
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 183.5% year-over-year to 163 employees (LinkedIn, mid-2026); the company states it has “blown through” its original 5-10 year roadmap in just 18 months; test deployments in logistics, grocery, and food production.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Cross-embodiment learning**: Models can transfer knowledge to any new robot hardware without starting data collection from scratch, lowering the marginal cost of onboarding autonomy.
- **Pure research focus**: Unlike competitors (e.g., Skild AI), Physical Intelligence deliberately avoids near-term commercialization, allowing the team to pursue general intelligence without product pressure.
- **World-class founding team**: Combination of top robotics academics (Levine, Finn) and experienced entrepreneurs/operators (Groom, Hausman).
- **Open-source release**: π0 weights and code are publicly available, fostering community contributions and accelerating research.

## Strategic Focus
- Current priorities include scaling foundation models to more tasks and environments, improving generalization and robustness, and expanding partnerships for real-world testing.
- The company explicitly does not give investors a timeline for monetization; instead it focuses on building general-purpose physical intelligence with a 5-10 year horizon (though progress has been faster than expected).
- Future strategy centers on continuous improvement via a loop of data collection → training → evaluation → more data, rather than rapid deployment.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a “pure company” – internally driven by research needs, not external market demands. Highly collaborative, with a mix of engineers, scientists, and roboticists working together.
- **Work Environment**: Hybrid/in-office – most roles require on-site presence in San Francisco (396 Treat Ave), though some remote flexibility exists. In-office setting with a “no reception” vibe, open lab space with robot stations.
- **Growth**: Team has scaled from ~80 (Jan 2026) to 163 (mid-2026) and is still hiring across research, ML infra, hardware, and engineering roles. Plans to grow “as slowly as possible” to maintain quality.
- **Perks & Engineering Highlights**: Access to cutting-edge robotics hardware and compute resources; opportunity to publish research and open-source code; exposure to a wide variety of real-world automation challenges (e.g., robots learning to fold pants, peel vegetables, make espresso). Employees come from top institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, Google, NVIDIA, and Anduril.

## Sources
1. [physicalintelligence.company](https://www.physicalintelligence.company/) – Official website, model releases, and values
2. [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/30/physical-intelligence-stripe-veteran-lachy-grooms-latest-bet-is-building-silicon-valleys-buzziest-robot-brains/) – In-depth profile including valuation, strategy, and culture
3. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/physical-intelligence) – Company details, headcount, funding, and talent sources
4. [Built In](https://builtin.com/company/physical-intelligence) – Career page, employee count, and office policy
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/physicalintelligence](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/physicalintelligence) – Current job openings

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