Skild Leases Former Roblox Offices in San Mateo

Another artificial intelligence firm is growing its operations with a new Bay Area outpost.

AI robotics startup Skild AI leased nearly 32,500 square feet of offices at 970 Park Place in San Mateo, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The space was formerly occupied by Roblox Corporation, the gaming company behind the popular online video game.

Skild AI was founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta and has scored the support of tech giants like Nvidia. Using general-purpose AI, Skild’s technology helps robots operate in settings from warehouses to homes without humans to input custom programming. The company is valued at $4.5 billion, according to the Business Times.

Skild, headquartered in Pittsburgh, is the latest AI company to make an expansion into the Bay Area.

AI startup Glean, for example, is based in Palo Alto and recently expanded with a new 45,000-square-foot San Francisco office. The lease came as OpenAI, the largest AI tenant in the Bay Area with 1 million square feet of offices, seeks to add another 200,000 to 300,000 square feet of offices to its portfolio. Though San Francisco remains a popular destination for these types of companies, Skild AI could be a sign of a shift toward the Peninsula and other parts of the Bay Area, according to the Business Times.

The Bay Area is seemingly the center of the AI boom when it comes to venture capital funding; reports from JLL and Pitchbook found that the Bay Area brought in 52 percent of the world’s VC funding for AI last year, raking in nearly $70 billion of a total of $134.6 billion.

Skild has raised at least $435 million to date, with the latest $35 million tranche in June coming from Nvidia and Samsung as part of a $100 million round led by SoftBank Group, Bloomberg reported. Last year, Skild raised $300 million from investors including Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos and Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue.

Overall, AI firms are expected to slash the office vacancy rate in San Francisco in half over the next five years, according to CBRE.

— Chris Malone Méndez