Antioch Inc., a developer of cloud-based simulation software for artificial intelligence-enabled robots, has raised $8.5 million in funding to accelerate the development of more autonomous systems outside the physical world.

Today’s round, which comes just four months after the startup raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding, was led by A* and Category Ventures. Others, including MaC Venture Capital, Abstract, Box Group and Icehouse Ventures also participated, as did angel investors including Shyam Sanker of Palantir Technologies Inc. and Adrian Macnei of Foxglove Inc.

Antioch’s mission is to replace the need for robotics companies to conduct testing in the physical world using real hardware and elaborately prepared spaces where it can be put through its paces. Generally, validating that robots behave as they’re designed to in the real world is extremely expensive and time-consuming. It requires developers to rent and prepare a physical space with different staging environments, and then resetting the hardware after every test run. The process is both expensive and cumbersome, and only ever covers a small fraction of the scenarios most robots will face once they’re deployed in real-world production environments.

That’s why simulation can be so powerful. By using a combination of physics and rendering engines with the most advanced “world models,” it’s possible to create digital twins of robots and simulate realistic environments that can be used for testing instead. But the problem is that this infrastructure is evolving far too rapidly for most developers to keep up, with new models and software tools constantly emerging with new capabilities.

Antioch’s role is to build the “platform layer” that connects developers of autonomous machines to this wave of constant innovation. Co-founder and Chief Executive Harry Mellsop (pictured, far left), who previously helped develop Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot software, compares his company to Cursor, the generative AI coding platform that makes the latest AI models instantly accessible to software developers. Its goal is to do the same for “autonomy teams” by ensuring they’re always able to access the most advanced simulation and infrastructure tools for testing robots.

More specifically, Antioch has developed a cloud simulation platform that enables teams to create digital twins of any kind of robot, so they can quickly validate any AI-powered system before it’s deployed in the real world. The goal is to eliminate the testing cycles that slow down robotic development. So instead of spending hours resetting a robot or moving it from one place to another, developers can just click a few buttons to get ready for the next test. Moreover, they can carry out thousands of tests in parallel by spinning up multiple digital twins of their robots at once.

“Robotics teams spend weeks staging warehouses and investing millions into test facilities to validate their systems,” Mellsop told SiliconANGLE. “Meanwhile, companies like Tesla, Waymo and Anduril spend hundreds of millions a year on simulation infrastructure to minimize exactly that. We think every autonomy team should have access to that level of tooling.”

Mellsop and two of his co-founders, Alex Langshur (second from right) and Michael Calvey, previously founded a security and intelligence startup called Transpose Inc. that was acquired by Chainalysis Inc. in 2023. That company grew to serve a number of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and the co-founders believe that they’re once again serving America’s best interests with Antioch.

Langshur explained that America used to have a significant manufacturing advantage over the rest of the world, only to throw it away through offshoring. As a result, it’s no longer the manufacturing capital of the world, and that’s something the current U.S. administration is trying to address. “The only economically viable path to reindustrialization runs through robotics and automation, and scalable testing is the rate-limiting step,” he insisted.

Mellsop told SiliconANGLE that the potential of doing this far exceeds even the AI industry that is becoming critical to robotics and automation today. He points out that the industries currently being disrupted by AI, such as software, professional services and knowledge work, represent around $8 trillion of the global economy.

“But manufacturing, logistics, construction, energy and agriculture represent more than $50 trillion,” he said. “AI penetration in those industries is basically zero today. The industrial revolution that’s coming with physical AI won’t be a sequel to the LLM revolution, it will dwarf it.”

Photos: Antioch