Google is moving forward in virtual AI by bringing a robotics software platform under its wing.
Alphabet-owned Intrinsic, which builds AI models and software designed to make industrial robots more accessible, is joining Google, the companies announced Wednesday. Intrinsic will remain a separate business within Google but will work closely with Google DeepMind and will fit into Google’s Gemini AI models and cloud services.
Alphabet declined to share information about the funding or the purchase price.
Intrinsic “graduated” to a private company owned by Alphabet in 2021 after five years of development within Alphabet’s X, the company’s moonshot research unit. Other companies that have graduated from X include robotics company Waymo and drone delivery company Wing.
Wendy Tan White has served as Intrinsic’s CEO since its inception in 2021.
The company hit the ground running. A few months after announcing its independence, Intrinsic acquired Vicarious, a robotics software company, in April 2022. Although the purchase price was not disclosed, Vicarious had raised about $250 million from VCs and tech big wigs like Jeff Bezos.
A few months later, Intrinsic acquired several shares of Open Robotics, a non-profit organization that develops hardware and software 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, a few months later. Flowstate is a robotics workflow development software platform aimed at developers without deep robotics experience – aligning with the company’s mission to make robotics accessible.
Since then, the company has fine-tuned 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 that brings together two companies working together on intelligent robots with the common goal of revolutionizing the way electronics are made, with the goal of full factory automation.
Now, the company is working on those goals in close collaboration with Google’s AI capabilities.
“Combined with Google’s incredible AI and infrastructure, we will unlock the promise of portable AI for the widest set of manufacturing businesses and developers. This will dramatically change manufacturing, from economics to operations, and enable truly advanced manufacturing,” Tan White wrote in the company’s blog post.
The move makes a lot of sense for Google as many technology leaders, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, see virtual AI as a natural next step in the monetization and development of AI models and technologies.
