Tera AI, a company that has been working stealthily on its spatial reasoning AI for the past year, announced it has raised a $7.8 million seed round co-led by Felicis and Inovia Capital, with participation from Caltech + Wilson Hill and Naval Ravikant. The company is developing a unique software-only solution to solve general-purpose navigation for autonomous hardware like robots.
Tera AI was created by Zhang, who previously led ML at Google X, and has a team of AI and simulation researchers from Google AI, Caltech, MIT, and the European Space Agency. Even though everyone has been focused on LLMs for the past two years, Zhang and his team have developed a novel way for an AI system to teach itself spatial reasoning. Zhang did his PhD at Caltech with Pietro Perona (an expert of computer vision, developing theories of how biology solved navigation in a general-purpose way).
Tera will use the funding to deploy the initial solution into real embedded devices this year and will expand the technical team across product and research.
KEY QUOTES:
“Spatial reasoning is one of those innate skills humans have that’s really underappreciated and missing in foundation models today. Most robots today lack the ability to move between physical environments, and 99% of autonomous systems use little to no AI for Navigation. Humans can easily navigate between indoor and outdoor places with just our eyes. Our brain passively builds internal models of the outside world, which we can reuse years later to recognize exactly where we are. We can read a map we’ve never seen and use it to navigate a maze-like indoor space. At Tera AI, we believe zero-shot navigation for robots is a problem that software-alone can solve.”
– Tony Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Tera AI
“What’s unique about Tera is not just their fundamental breakthroughs in spatial AI research, but also powerful robotics partners that need what they are building yesterday. It’s the deep dual focus on groundbreaking research and a sharpened product focus that will position them to redefine what people think robots can do in the near term.”
– Viviana Faga, Partner at Felicis
“AI’s next frontier goes beyond text to understanding and acting in the physical world. Advances in ‘world reasoning’ and edge-based inference are making that a reality. Tera AI is at the cutting edge of applying AI to solve fundamental challenges in navigation and perception.”
– Steve Woods, CTO at Inovia
