Google is moving further into physical AI by bringing a well-known robotics software platform under its wing.
Alphabet-owned Intrinsic, which creates artificial intelligence models and software designed to make industrial robots accessible, is joining Google, the companies announced Wednesday. Intrinsic will remain a separate entity within Google, but will work closely with Google DeepMind and leverage AI Gemini models and Google cloud services.
Alphabet declined to share information regarding the financing or the purchase price.
Intrinsic “graduated” as an independent company owned by Alphabet in 2021 after five years of development at Alphabet’s X, the research division of Moonshot. Other companies that have graduated from X include robot taxi company Waymo and drone delivery company Wing.
Wendy Tan White has served as CEO of Intrinsic since its inception in 2021.
Society is waking up. A few months after announcing its independence, Intrinsic acquired Vicarious, a partner robotics software company, in April 2022. Although the purchase price was not disclosed, Vicarious raised about $250 million from virtual businesses and tech bigwigs like Jeff Bezos.
A few months later, Intrinsic acquired several for-profit divisions of Open Robotics, a nonprofit that builds hardware and software platforms for the robotics industry.
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Despite this rapid expansion, Intrinsic laid off 20% of its workforce in January 2023.
The company announced its first product, Flowstate, just a few months later. Flowstate is a software platform for developing robotic workflows aimed at developers who do not have deep robotics experience – in line with the company’s mission to make robotics more accessible.
Since then, the company has tweaked the technology, improved its simulation capabilities, and released its Intrinsic Vision AI model in late 2025.
Intrinsic announced a joint venture with electronics manufacturer Foxconn in October 2025, detailing a collaboration between the two companies on universal intelligent robots to transform the way electronics are made with the goal of full factory automation.
Now the company is working to achieve these goals by working more closely with Google’s AI.
“Coupled with Google’s incredible AI and infrastructure, we will unlock the promise of physical AI for a much wider group of manufacturing businesses and developers. This will fundamentally shift manufacturing, from its economics to operations, and enable truly advanced manufacturing,” Tan White wrote in a post on the company’s blog.
The move makes a lot of sense for Google, as many technology leaders, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Qualcomm’s Cristian Amon, see physical AI as the next natural step in monetizing and developing AI models and technologies.