Antioch, a simulation platform built for physical AI, has announced a $32 million Series A funding round led by Greylock. The investment also includes participation from A*, Category Ventures, Box Group, and Icehouse Ventures, along with a group of high-profile angel investors. The company provides a high-fidelity environment where robotics and autonomy teams can develop, test, and validate AI systems before real-world deployment.
The Validation Bottleneck in Physical AI
AI has fundamentally changed software development by compressing cycles from weeks to days. That same acceleration has not yet reached the physical economy, which accounts for an estimated $50 trillion in annual activity. Every improvement to a robot, autonomous system, or industrial machine still requires validation on real hardware, making physical testing one of the industry's biggest bottlenecks.
A Trusted Simulation Loop
Antioch gives physical AI teams a development loop to build, test, and validate autonomous systems at cloud scale. The company was founded by Harry Mellsop and Alex Langshur, second-time founders and alumni of Tesla and Meta Reality Labs. It describes itself as the first platform that takes autonomous systems from design to validation to mass deployment in a single simulation environment.
Funding Led by Greylock and Notable Angels
Greylock led the Series A round, with participation from A*, Category Ventures, Box Group, and Icehouse Ventures. Angel investors include Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir, Adrian Macneil, CEO of Foxglove, and Ian Andrews, an NVIDIA executive and former Groq executive. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand the engineering team.
Investor Perspective on Physical AI
Saam Motamedi, General Partner at Greylock, described physical AI and robotics as reaching a key inflection moment. He added that the teams that harness AI to accelerate innovation cycles will gain a clear advantage. In his view, software-speed innovation in the physical world will become the foundation of the next industrial revolution.
Customer Traction with Amazon's Ring
Antioch is already working with leading physical AI teams, including Amazon's Ring. Jason Mitura, Vice President of Software Development at Amazon and Ring Chief Product Officer, said Antioch's simulations have closely matched physical test results, including in scenarios that were deliberately held out of calibration. This confidence has allowed the team to move more development into simulation and reduce costly physical testing.
Partnerships with NVIDIA and Nebius
Antioch has established strong partnerships with leading physical AI infrastructure players, including compute giant NVIDIA and cloud company Nebius. These relationships are intended to support the platform's fidelity and scale. By combining simulation capabilities with powerful cloud and compute resources, Antioch aims to give customers a reliable path from experiment to deployment.
Plans for Accelerated Growth
The new capital will accelerate product development, deepen simulation capabilities, and expand the engineering team. Demand is growing across robotics, drones, industrial automation, fixed perception, and other physical AI applications. Antioch plans to use the funding to support these expanding use cases and help enterprises validate autonomous systems at cloud scale.
Antioch's Series A round signals growing confidence in simulation as a critical layer for physical AI development. With backing from Greylock, strategic partnerships, and early traction with customers like Amazon's Ring, the company is positioned to address a major bottleneck in autonomous system deployment. Its platform could play a foundational role in accelerating the next wave of physical AI innovation.