The company emerges from stealth with first customers and backing from Venrock, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Hitachi Ventures to apply the power of AI to solve real world problems
Physical AI company to target the “trillion sensor economy” with new foundation model
Archetype AI, a physical AI company helping humanity make sense of the world, today announced its emergence from stealth and the introduction of Newton™, a first-of-its-kind foundation model that understands the physical world. With Newton, Archetype AI is on a mission to use the power of artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems – empowering people and organizations with an understanding of the physical environment that wasn’t previously possible.
In support of this mission, Archetype AI has raised a $13 million seed funding round led by Venrock, with participation from Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Hitachi Ventures, Buckley Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and several angel investors. In conjunction with the financing, Ganesh Srinivasan, Partner at Venrock, will join the board.
To date, breakthroughs in generative AI have focused on text and images, leaving the physical world unaccounted for. However, in the same way that large language models have decoded patterns in language, AI is capable of decoding the hidden patterns of the physical world that are too complex or fast-moving for humans to perceive.
With Newton, Archetype AI is introducing a first-of-its-kind physical AI foundational model that is capable of perceiving, understanding and reasoning about the world. Newton fuses multimodal temporal data – including signals from accelerometers, gyroscopes, radars, cameras, microphones, thermometers and other environmental sensors – with natural language to unlock insights about the physical world in real-time.
“The biggest problems in the world are physical, not digital,” said Ivan Poupyrev, CEO and co-founder of Archetype AI. “We believe the power of AI can and should do more for us than incremental productivity gains. Our goal is to encode the entire physical world so we can derive meaning from the signals all around us and create new solutions to problems that we previously couldn’t understand.”
“The combination of Archetype AI’s foundation model and our portfolio of IoT and sensor solutions can bring the power of physical AI to millions,” said Kim Lee, Senior Director of System Applications Engineering at Infineon. “Having the ability to create a living view of complex sensor-based data from the world around us enables us to deliver connected devices which understand human intention and can deliver a whole new level of consumer experience.”
Today, the industry’s biggest challenges are being solved with one-off bespoke solutions, which are costly and slow to scale. Archetype AI’s universal foundation model is designed to scale across any sensor data thereby reducing time and cost to market. The accelerating convergence of terrestrial, atmospheric and space-based sensors, combined with machine learning and data networks is contributing to the “trillion sensor economy.” With early customers like Infineon and Fortune Global 500 brands across automotive, consumer electronics, construction, logistics and retail, Archetype AI’s technology allows anyone to pose open-ended questions about the physical environment and take informed action.
“The ambition of what Archetype AI is building can’t be underestimated – their physical AI model serves the ‘trillion sensor economy,’ and the use cases are nearly endless,” said Gayathri Radhakrishnan, Partner at Hitachi Ventures. “They are unlocking the boundless data of the physical world with a foundation model built to understand and engage with the world around us in a way that has never been possible before.”
“Archetype AI’s foundation model incorporates text, audio, video and time series data from sensors that can also output text and commands to building systems and robots,” said Franziska Bossart, Head of Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. “We’re excited about how Archetype AI is integrating all of these input types together, which could have a tremendous impact and contribution to robot control or perception, decision-making and path planning – all of which have the potential to further optimize the flow of goods through a fulfillment center and improve speed of delivery to customers.”
Established by former leaders of Google Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP), Archetype AI’s founding team is comprised of Ivan Poupyrev, Brandon Barbello, Leonardo Giusti, Jaime Lien and Nicholas Gillian, who combine decades of experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, hardware and software design from household names like Disney, Sony, Samsung, NASA, Stanford and MIT. The newly secured capital will be instrumental in growing the Archetype AI team and building out the platform at scale to encompass diverse customer use cases across various verticals.
“It’s rare to see a team whose backgrounds can match this kind of vision, with experience building and scaling thoughtfully designed products for billions of users,” said Ethan Batraski, Partner at Venrock. “With the Archetype AI team’s approach of using technology to inform design, and design to inspire technology, it has accelerated the transformation of an invention into an industrial scale innovation with a massive market implication.”
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