The company announced the Series B funding round Sunday (April 26), saying it would help Sereact expand into the U.S. and scale Cortex 2.0, its “robotic brain” that it says “augments a vision-language-action (VLA) model with a world model.”
Most work involving world models, Sereact’s announcement said, happens in research labs using synthetic data, while Cortex 2.0 is trained on more than a billion “picks” of real production.
“We bet early that you can’t build real robotics AI in a lab,” Sereact co-founder and CEO Dr. Ralf Gulde said.
“You build it with a data flywheel fed by real deployments – shipping into production, living with the failures, and letting the model learn from what actually happens on the floor. The numbers show it worked. Two hundred systems. One billion picks. One intervention per 53,000. Nobody else is close.”
Sereact’s customers include companies such as Active Ants, Austrian Post, BMW, Daimler Truck, Mercedes-Benz and PepsiCo.
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The company said it first deployed its technology to warehouses as no other environment offers the same mix of data points: “billions of real interactions, every object shape imaginable, hard throughput constraints, and consequences when the robot gets it wrong.”
Sereact is part of the “physical AI” field, or AI models that simulate the behavior of things in the physical world.
As PYMNTS wrote last month, the recent focus on this field “reflects a shift in the AI startup landscape away from general-purpose tools toward systems that can perform defined tasks in sectors such as robotics, healthcare, logistics and enterprise software.”
Interest in physical AI has risen in the midst of a broader debate about the role robotics could play in furthering artificial intelligence.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has contended that humanoid robots could pave the way for artificial general intelligence (AGI), suggesting that machines that can interact with the physical world could lead to greater progress in autonomy and reasoning.
“While the claim remains speculative, funding patterns suggest investors are betting that AI systems connected to real-world environments could become a major frontier of innovation,” that report added.
In related news, last week saw a report that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was working on a $10 billion funding deal for his physical AI effort, code-named “Project Prometheus.”
