Generalist

Overview

Generalist is a general physical intelligence and robotics company co-founded by Pete Florence, who serves as CEO. Florence previously developed vision-language-action (VLA) work at Google before founding Generalist. His motivation for the company traces back to frustration with manual laboratory work during his studies of perovskites and cadmium selenide quantum dots at Cambridge, where his advisor was Richard Friend, inventor of optoelectronics.

The company's progress between its two public robot generations is a widely-cited data point in the physical AI conversation. Gen 0, released in November 2025, achieved a 64% success rate on dexterous manipulation tasks. Gen 1, released five months later, achieved 99%+ success on the same tasks — a result achieved by training from scratch on real-world physical interaction data rather than fine-tuning a VLA model. The key finding: 1 hour of robot data is sufficient to reach 99% reliability on trained tasks. Customers include auto manufacturers and logistics companies.