Tera AI Secures $7.8M to transform robotics with spatial intelligence

Recently, Apptronik, an AI-driven humanoid robotics company, closed a $403 million Series A funding round, for the future of robotics. While autonomous systems are becoming increasingly integrated into daily life, one of the biggest challenges remains their ability to navigate and interact with the physical world effectively.

Unlike humans, who intuitively process spatial information and adjust their movements in real time, robots, especially non-humanoid ones, struggle with dynamic environments, requiring advanced AI and sensor fusion to make context-aware decisions.

Tera AI, a startup that recently emerged from stealth mode, is aiming to change this by enabling robots to interpret and interact with their environments more effectively. 

With a noteworthy seed funding of $7.8 million, Tera AI is constructing an AI system with spatial reasoning capabilities to enable cost-effective visual navigation for autonomous robots.

Tera AI’s founder Tony Zhang in one of his Linkedin posts shared that the human aptitude for navigating physical environments is remarkable, underpinned by an inherent capacity to develop subconscious models of our surroundings. This enables autonomous movement and the recognition of previously visited locations. Furthermore, we possess the ability to interpret unfamiliar two-dimensional maps for navigation within new urban areas. 

This competency, however, is evidently absent in contemporary robotics and that’s what led him and his team to launch a platform that would enable a single piece of software that “just works” across all autonomy platforms that already has a camera and a GPU.

Zhang, founded Tera AI in 2023, after spending considerable time as a Machine Learning Lead at Google X, where he and his team developed innovative AI algorithms and models designed to tackle a variety of challenges, including optimal control, prediction, and sensing.

He has gained significant expertise in the field of public policy and startups through global experiences in academia, industry, and international organizations, after earning his PhD in Neural Computation with theoretical and applied knowledge in deep learning, computer vision, reinforcement learning from Caltech.

The startup team includes AI pioneers from top industry labs like Google AI, MIT, Caltech and top Space Agencies, who are deeply engrossed in creating  AI capable of superhuman spatial reasoning by building a cognition-inspired model.

Their seed funding is backed by top-tier investors including Felicis, Inovia, Caltech, Wilson Hill, and entrepreneur-investor Naval Ravikant, who according to the team of Tera shares their “bold vision.”

In an interview with TechCrunch, the founder Tony Zhang highlighted that the majority of today’s robots are unable to navigate between different locations, and AI-based navigation is used by only a small fraction of autonomous vehicles. Therefore this software known as zero-shot navigation for robots can overcome these obstacles — and investors just gave him $7.8 million in seed funding to prove it.

From Tesla’s autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems to Nvidia’s Omniverse platform the applications of spatial intelligence are diverse and are being felt across the industrial spectrum.

Some other startups that are using the AI spatial intelligence in the physical realm are Mytra, who uses AI software to enhance its bot efficiency in the company’s warehouse automation solution, where as Auki Labs is using a spatial computing focussing on the merger of of the digital and physical world to accelerate a smooth collaboration between humans, devices and AI.

While several well-known companies like Samsung, Apple, Walmart have already been leveraging spatial intelligence in AI to enhance our lives, there are several startups that have embarked on this journey of incorporating spatial reasoning into their AI models.

Healthcare startups like Exex.ai are empowering hospitals with spatial reasoning in its AI software to assist throughout surgical procedures, whereas Mantis robotics have established a safe human-robot collaboration with physical intelligence for flexible factories and warehouses.

As Fei-Fei Li, who is often considered the “god mother of AI” said, “Nature has created this virtuous cycle of seeing and doing, powered by spatial intelligence.”