Antioch raises $8.5M Seed to be the Cursor for physical AI
Antioch closed $8.5M Seed at a $60M valuation to build simulation tools for robot developers. A* and Category Ventures co-led, with MaC, Abstract, Box Group and Icehouse along for the ride.
The tag they're wearing: Cursor for physical AI. In software, you program a digital agent with code and iterate fast. In robotics, you can't β every iteration costs real hardware time and real crashes. Antioch's bet is you close the sim-to-real gap by building domain-specific simulation libraries with models from Nvidia and World Labs, pooling refinement across customers so no single robotics company has to solve its own simulator.
The founders matter here. Harry Mellsop and Alex Langshur (Transpose, sold to Chainalysis), Collin Schlager from Meta Reality Labs, Colton Swingle from Google DeepMind, and Michael Calvey. Adrian Macneil, Cruise veteran and Foxglove founder, angel-investing. This is a robotics team, not software people parachuting into robots.
Why it's worth watching. LLM researchers are running out of digital evals β MIT's David Mayo is already using Antioch to have LLMs design robots and test them in sim. That's the beginning of a loop where agent training moves from text games into physics sandboxes. Whoever owns that sandbox owns a lot. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/this-simulation-startup-wants-to-be-the-cursor-for-physical-ai/
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The tag they're wearing: Cursor for physical AI. In software, you program a digital agent with code and iterate fast. In robotics, you can't β every iteration costs real hardware time and real crashes. Antioch's bet is you close the sim-to-real gap by building domain-specific simulation libraries with models from Nvidia and World Labs, pooling refinement across customers so no single robotics company has to solve its own simulator.
The founders matter here. Harry Mellsop and Alex Langshur (Transpose, sold to Chainalysis), Collin Schlager from Meta Reality Labs, Colton Swingle from Google DeepMind, and Michael Calvey. Adrian Macneil, Cruise veteran and Foxglove founder, angel-investing. This is a robotics team, not software people parachuting into robots.
Why it's worth watching. LLM researchers are running out of digital evals β MIT's David Mayo is already using Antioch to have LLMs design robots and test them in sim. That's the beginning of a loop where agent training moves from text games into physics sandboxes. Whoever owns that sandbox owns a lot. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/this-simulation-startup-wants-to-be-the-cursor-for-physical-ai/
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