Airtree invested A$5 million in Metacognition, an Adelaide startup building AI for robot navigation. The deal lifts the company's Pre-Seed round to A$15 million. Main Sequence supplied the earlier A$10 million.
Round and backers
Airtree joins Main Sequence as an investor in the AI lab. Airtree co-founder Craig Blair said the firm backs teams building missing AI pieces. The Pre-Seed raise is unusually large for its stage.
Company focus
Metacognition builds the AI layer that helps robots understand commands and avoid unsafe actions. The company aims to supply an operating system for robotics manufacturers. Its technology places guardrails around robot behavior in physical environments.
Model performance
NavGPT-3 is an open-source vision-language model for robot navigation. It combines reasoning and navigation to interpret verbal instructions. Its strongest results used OpenAI and Anthropic models, but its stand-alone model also beat Alibaba and Mistral.
Metacognition plans to hire 20 people, with 90% holding PhDs. The company expects to grow to about 100 employees. Reaching that scale will require a larger funding round.
Read more: forbes.com.au