ABB has invested in the artificial intelligence research company Vicarious through its venture capital unit ABB Technology Ventures. San Francisco-based Vicarious has been developing a unified algorithmic architecture to achieve ‘human-level intelligence’ in vision, language and motor control.

Girish Nadkarni, head of ABB Technology Ventures, said: “This partnership is a perfect fit. ABB is a pioneer in the robotics industry, with a global installed base of more 250,000 industrial robots, while Vicarious has positioned itself to do the same for AI. Robotics technology has reached the point where it can perform many tasks that are challenging or unsafe for humans. The combination of robots and artificial intelligence offers great opportunities for the future.”

Since it was launched in 2010, Vicarious has raised nearly $70 million from investors, including Mark Zuckerberg, Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel.