Plato has raised $16 million in Series A funding to expand its simulated workplace environments designed to train and evaluate AI models on real-world jobs and workflows. The round was led by Nava Ventures, with participation from Gradient Ventures, Transpose Platform, and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. Nava Ventures founder Freddie Martignetti will join Plato’s board.
The financing brings Plato’s total funding to $19 million following an earlier seed round led by Gradient Ventures.
Founded in 2025, Plato creates realistic, repeatable environments where AI developers can train models to use software, make decisions, respond to changing circumstances, and complete multistep tasks before deploying them into live business systems.
The company argues that training agents directly on production software can introduce significant risk. For example, an AI learning to make a purchase could spend real money, while an agent practicing administrative workflows could accidentally modify actual business records.
Plato recreates these scenarios inside resettable simulations, allowing AI labs to apply reinforcement learning while avoiding consequences for live systems.
The company works with domain specialists to reproduce tools, workflows, constraints, and expectations across jobs in areas such as customer support, people operations, finance, accounting, and healthcare administration.
Plato also evaluates how models complete tasks, not just outcomes. Under its evaluation framework, a purchasing agent that completes an order but exceeds a budget would not be considered successful.
The company is developing increasingly complex environments involving longer work sequences and interactions with simulated people.
Plato plans to use the Series A financing to expand its library of simulated work experiences, compensate professionals for recreating their jobs inside training environments, and deploy AI agents on real tasks to collect additional experience for future simulations.
KEY QUOTES:
“Mastering real complex work comes from experience doing those tasks. We’re building simulations that capture the tools, decisions, and unexpected situations those tasks involve, so AI models can gain experience in safe, contained environments before developers put them to work.”
Robert Farlow, Co-Founder And CEO Of Plato
“The feedback a model receives shapes what it learns. We build evaluations that reflect what the job actually requires, so developers can distinguish a high score from work done correctly.”
Pranav Putta, Co-Founder And CTO Of Plato
