As generative AI is increasingly entering the physical world through robotics, vehicles and drones are increasingly entering the physical world, the need to map cloud-based AIS to real-world environments can lead to huge mismatches. ReplayDev Tools Startup, a Stockholm-based development tools startup, built a data heap for this emerging “physical AI”, has received $17 million in seed funding to help AI developers smooth out the bumps from code to the road.
The seed round is led by Germany’s 9th Capital, and the total funding of the startup, founded in 2022, has reached $20.2 million so far.
Nikolaus West, co-founder and CEO of RERUN, told TechCrunch that AI operating in the physical world is already thriving. Per west, Rerun’s database and cloud data platform is built on the basis of physical AI data and workflows to manage multimodal data such as video streams, 3D scenes and tensors.
The startup’s multi-modal data stack supports visual debugging, helping developers track through the robot’s movements to better understand where problems may go wrong – importing data from real-world sensors into power space visualization and analysis.
“The data infrastructure in which AI exists doesn’t really understand physical AI data. And the old-fashioned robotics tools aren’t built for the machine learning world, so data breaks and trying to use both things together creates a lot of friction for the team.”
He suggests potential “data flywheel” effects in creating AI targeting the physical world. The smarter the system, the more robot units can be deployed, which in turn means more data to train the AI model, ensuring better results for every western.
But the belief in achieving this startup is that AI developers need dedicated tools to help their models go smoothly in the real world.
The visualization of physical AI data created by Rerun’s open source platform has been included in other open source projects by companies such as Meta, Google, Hugging Face and Unitree.
The replay team is drawn from veterans like Apple, AWS, Meta, Unity, Zenly and Zipline. CTO, Emil Ernerfeldt is also the creator of Egui, the largest open source GUI framework in Rust.
Rerun’s strength in open source led to the investment, which is a particularly big seed for European startups, said in a statement.
“The work of replaying open source allows them to gain the trust of some of the most ambitious companies in the world of physical AI,” he advised.
Sunflower Seed Capital also participated in the seed round of Rerun with existing investors Costanoa Ventures and Seedcamp.
