Generative AI in the Physical World
As Generative AI moves increasingly into the physical world through robotics, vehicles, and drones, the need to map cloud-based AIs to real-world environments can lead to a huge mismatch. Rerun, a Stockholm-based dev tools startup, which builds a data stack for this emergent kind of “Physical AI”, has secured $17 million in seed funding to help AI developers smooth out the bumps from code to road, as it were.
Rerun’s Approach and Funding
The seed round was led by Point Nine capital out of Germany, bringing the 2022-founded startup’s total funding to date to $20.2 million. Nikolaus West, Co-Founder and CEO of Rerun, told TechCrunch that AI which operates in the physical world is already booming. Rerun’s database and cloud data platform are built from the ground-up for Physical AI data and workflows, managing multimodal data such as video streams, 3D scenes, and tensors.
The startup’s multimodal data stack supports visual debugging, helping developers to track back through their bots’ movements to better understand where things might be going wrong — importing data from real-world sensors to power spatial visualization and analytics.
Challenges and Solutions
West explained that the data infrastructure currently available for AI does not fully understand physical AI data. The integration of old-school robotics tools with machine learning tools creates friction for teams. Rerun aims to provide dedicated tools to help AI developers navigate the challenges of deploying models in the real world.
West suggests a potential “data flywheel” effect where the smarter the system is, the more robotics units can be deployed, leading to more data for training AI models and ultimately ensuring better outcomes.
Rerun’s Impact and Team
Visualizations of Physical AI data created by Rerun’s open-source platform have been incorporated into other open-source projects by companies such as Meta, Google, Hugging Face, and Unitree. The Rerun team consists of veterans from companies like Apple, AWS, Meta, Unity, Zenly, and Zipline. CTO, Emil Ernerfeldt, is also the creator of egui, the biggest open-source GUI framework in Rust.
In a statement, Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a partner at Point Nine, highlighted Rerun’s strength in open source as a key factor in the investment, noting that their work has gained the trust of ambitious companies in the world of Physical AI. Sunflower Capital also participated in Rerun’s seed round, along with existing investors Costanoa Ventures and Seedcamp.
