Physical AI company Archetype AI announced its emergence from stealth and has introduced Newton, a first-of-its-kind foundation model that understands the physical world. The company also 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. Ganesh Srinivasan, Partner at Venrock, will join the board in connection with the funding.
With Newton, Archetype AI is on a mission to use AI’s power to solve real-world problems, enabling people and organizations to understand the physical environment in a way that wasn’t previously possible.
So far, the breakthroughs in generative AI have focused on text and images, leaving the physical world unaccounted for. But in the same way that large language models have decoded patterns in language, AI can decode the hidden patterns of the physical world that are too complex or fast-moving for humans to perceive.
Through Newton, Archetype AI introduces a first-of-its-kind physical AI foundational model capable of perceiving, understanding, and reasoning about the world. Newton combines 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.
Archetype AI’s universal foundation model was built to scale across any sensor data thereby reducing time and cost to market. And 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 such as Infineon and Fortune Global 500 brands across automotive, consumer electronics, construction, logistics, and retail, Archetype AI’s technology enables anyone to pose open-ended questions about the physical environment and take informed action.
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 such as Disney, Sony, Samsung, NASA, Stanford, and MIT. The newly secured funding 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.
KEY QUOTES:
“The biggest problems in the world are physical, not digital. 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.”
– Ivan Poupyrev, CEO and co-founder of Archetype AI
“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. 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.”
– Kim Lee, Senior Director of System Applications Engineering at Infineon
“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. 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.”
– Gayathri Radhakrishnan, Partner at Hitachi Ventures
“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. 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.”
– Franziska Bossart, Head of Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund
“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. 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.”
– Ethan Batraski, Partner at Venrock
