Archetype AI, based in Palo Alto, announced Newton, a foundation model designed to understand the physical world. Archetype AI secured $13 million in seed funding, led by Venrock and supported by the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Hitachi Ventures, Buckley Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, and several angel investors. As part of this financial arrangement, Ganesh Srinivasan, a Partner at Venrock, will join the company’s board.
The foundation model, Newton, integrates multimodal temporal data from sources such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, radars, cameras, and microphones with natural language processing. This enables the model to provide insights into the physical world in real time, extending the application of AI beyond text and images.
Ivan Poupyrev, CEO and co-founder of Archetype AI, stated the company’s objective to utilize AI for understanding and solving problems related to the physical world, going beyond mere productivity enhancements. The technology is designed to interpret signals from the environment and develop new solutions.
The company aims to offer a scalable solution across various sensor data, reducing time to market and costs. This approach is relevant to the evolving sensor economy, which includes terrestrial, atmospheric, and space-based sensors, machine learning, and data networks. Archetype AI has engaged early customers, including Infineon and several Fortune Global 500 companies in sectors like automotive, consumer electronics, and retail.
Archetype AI was established by former members from Google Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP). Its founding team includes Ivan Poupyrev, Brandon Barbello, Leonardo Giusti, Jaime Lien, and Nicholas Gillian, who have experience in AI, machine learning, hardware, and software design from organizations such as Disney, Sony, Samsung, NASA, Stanford, and MIT. The recent funding will support the team’s growth and the expansion of the platform to accommodate a range of customer use cases across different industries.
