Lindon Gao

As co-founder and CEO of Dyna Robotics, Lindon Gao is part of a new wave of founders determined to move AI beyond language and into motion. His ambition is to unlock what he calls “physical AGI” — machines that can understand, adapt and work reliably in the physical world. But instead of building humanoid robots for spectacle, Dyna develops intelligent robotic arms powered by foundation models that learn from real environments and improve with every deployment.

Within a year of inception, Dyna Robotics has progressed from early research to commercial deployment, raised $120 million in Series A funding from leading global investors including CRV, First Round Capital, NVIDIA Ventures and the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, and surpassed a valuation of $600 million. At the centre of that momentum is DYNA-1, the world’s first commercially deployed dexterous manipulation foundation model designed to generalise across tasks.

Today, Dyna’s robots fold napkins in restaurants, organise towels in gyms, and handle garments in laundromats for up to 16 hours a day. While these tasks appear simple, they demand precision, adaptability and resilience. For Gao, this solves real labour shortages and prove that embodied AI can deliver measurable return on investment.

Gao’s conviction in practical AI was shaped by his earlier success as co-founder of Caper AI, the smart shopping cart company that reimagined in-store retail. In 2021, Caper was acquired by Instacart for $350 million.

Born in China and raised in the United States, Lindon Gao peaks about physical AGI with ambition and discipline. In a field crowded with demos and promises, he focuses on uptime, generalisation and payback periods. His perspective resonates with investors, operators and policymakers alike because it sits at the intersection of frontier AI research and hard operational reality.