Rerun’s open source AI platform for robots, drones, and cars revs up with $17M seed

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.

The seed round was led by Point Nine 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 that operates in the physical world is already booming. Per West, Rerun’s database and cloud data platform is 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.

“The data infrastructure that exists for AI does not really understand physical AI data. And old-school robotics tools are not built for the machine learning world, so the data breaks, and trying to use both these things together creates a huge amount of friction for the teams,” West explained.

He suggests there is a potential “data flywheel” effect in creating AI geared toward the physical world. The smarter the system is, the more robotics units can be deployed, which in turn means more data to train the AI model on, ensuring better outcomes, per West.

But to get there, the startup’s conviction is that AI developers need dedicated tools to help their models move smoothly through the real world.

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 is drawn from veterans from the likes of Apple, AWS, Meta, Unity, Zenly, and Zipline. CTO Emil Ernerfeldt is also the creator of egui, the biggest open source GUI framework in Rust.

Commenting in a statement, Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a partner at Point Nine, said Rerun’s strength in open source led to the investment — which is a notably large seed round for a European startup.

“Rerun’s work on open source has allowed them to gain the trust of some of the most ambitious companies in the world of physical AI,” he suggested.

Sunflower Capital also participated in Rerun’s seed round, along with existing investors Costanoa Ventures and Seedcamp.