Industrial artificial intelligence startup Noetive formally launched today with $41 million in seed funding. Its software learns how a factory floor or a freight operation runs day to day, and the company says design partners in manufacturing, logistics, energy and data centers already use it.

Most AI products to date “were designed for information work living on the internet,” Chief Executive Amir Frenkel said in the launch announcement. Running a plant or a distribution network means juggling materials, machinery, labor and suppliers that never stop changing. According to Noetive, the decisions tying those together still rest on data from siloed systems that were never built to coordinate an entire business.

Noetive calls its answer an “intelligence of record.” At the core is a self-improving AI model the company refers to as a brain. The agents built on it run on top of the tools a customer already has and take on the hardest operational problems end to end. Each deployment is supposed to make the model more capable. Physical conditions reach it through a multimodal sensing pod that Noetive designs itself.

Food and beverage manufacturer Steuben Foods Inc. is one of the early partners. Its chief executive, Menachem Katz, said production planning has always been one of the most time-consuming parts of running the business because even small changes ripple across the operation. Noetive now reads both Steuben’s system data and conditions on the factory floor, and Katz said work “that once happened monthly and took a week of planning now happens daily and takes minutes.”

Meta Platforms Inc. employed Frenkel as a vice president for nearly a decade, and he has also held leadership roles at Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. The rest of the team comes from those companies and from Fortune 500 businesses, and includes researchers who have worked on foundation models.

The funding will pay for research into self-improving AI for physical operations, the company said. Field testing happens with a curated group of design partners, and Noetive is recruiting AI researchers and full-stack engineers to expand its staff.

Eclipse Ventures led the round. Bloomberg reported in April that the firm had hired Frenkel from Meta as its first chief AI officer. Noetive took shape inside Eclipse from there, with the firm helping recruit the founding team.

Other backers in the round are Craft Ventures Management, The Westly Group, Swish Ventures, Factory, Incite Ventures, Gigascale Capital, Operator Partners and Liquid 2 Ventures. Nest co-founder Matt Rogers founded Incite, and Gigascale was started by former Meta Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer. Individual investors include Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, Airbnb Inc. Chief Technology Officer Ahmad Al-Dahle and the three co-founders of Decart.AI Inc.

Eclipse founder and Chief Executive Lior Susan said the $30 trillion physical economy “has largely been left behind” by AI. “We saw an enormous opportunity to change that, and built Noetive to go after it,” he said.

Photo: Noetive