Arizona Tribune - Antioch Raises $32M to Bring Software Speed to Physical AI Development

NEW YORK CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / September 8, 2026 / Antioch, the simulation platform for physical AI, today announced a $32 million Series A led by Greylock, with participation from A*, Category Ventures, Box Group, and Icehouse Ventures. The company's prominent angel investors include Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Adrian Macneil, CEO of Foxglove; and Ian Andrews, an NVIDIA executive and former Groq executive. Antioch enables robotics and autonomy teams to develop, test and validate AI systems in high-fidelity simulation, scaling from a single experiment to thousands of parallel evaluations before real-world deployment. The company is led by second-time founders, and alumni of Tesla and Meta Reality Labs.

Antioch is already working with leading physical AI teams, including Amazon's Ring, helping customers accelerate development cycles, while dramatically increasing the volume of testing they can run before deploying systems in the real world. Antioch has established strong partnerships with leading Physical AI infrastructure players, including compute giant NVIDIA (NVDA) and cloud company Nebius (NBIS).

AI has fundamentally changed how software is built, compressing development cycles from weeks to days. But that same acceleration has yet to meaningfully reach the physical world, despite the physical economy accounting for an estimated $50 trillion in annual economic activity. Every improvement to a robot, autonomous system or industrial machine still has to be validated on real hardware, where every test consumes time, equipment and engineering resources. As investment in physical AI accelerates, physical validation has emerged as one of the industry's biggest bottlenecks. While simulation promises to accelerate development, today's platforms lack both the fidelity and scale needed to accurately predict real-world performance.

"AI has transformed the pace and possibilities of software development in the blink of an eye," said Harry Mellsop, co-founder of Antioch. "Now, physical AI is extending that same transformation into the real-world. Bringing these systems into reality requires a new approach to testing, powered by high-fidelity simulations that enable faster, safer, and more reliable deployment."

Antioch gives Physical AI teams the trusted development loop to build, test and validate autonomous systems before deploying them in the real world. By calibrating high-fidelity simulations to each customer's hardware and running them at cloud scale, the platform enables enterprises to accelerate development, increase test coverage and bring new capabilities to production faster.

"Simulation isn't new to the industry, but low fidelity, lack of scale, and tooling fragmentation have limited its role in the development process," said Alex Langshur, co-founder of Antioch. "Antioch is the first platform that takes autonomous systems from design to validation to mass deployment in a single simulation environment."

"It's increasingly clear that Physical AI and robotics are hitting a key inflection moment," said Saam Motamedi, General Partner at Greylock. "As AI accelerates every industry, advantage comes from how teams can harness it to accelerate innovation cycles, and the teams that do this best will win. Software-speed innovation in the physical world will be the foundation of the next industrial revolution. We believe Antioch is building the core development platform for this next phase of physical AI."

"Antioch is changing how we develop and validate complex systems by enabling us to rely on simulation with a level of confidence that wasn't previously possible", Said Jason Mitura, VP of Software Development at Amazon and Ring CPO. "Antioch's simulations have closely matched our physical test results, including in scenarios we deliberately held out of calibration. That confidence lets us move more testing and development into simulation, reducing reliance on costly physical test programs, accelerating engineering cycles, and allowing our teams to focus on delivering better products for customers".

The funding will accelerate Antioch's product development, expand its engineering team, and deepen its simulation capabilities as demand grows across robotics, drones, industrial automation, fixed perception and other Physical AI applications.

About Antioch

Antioch is the simulation platform accelerating Physical AI development. The company enables robotics and autonomy teams to develop, test and validate AI systems in high-fidelity simulations calibrated to their own hardware, allowing them to scale from a single experiment to thousands of parallel evaluations before deployment. Founded by second-time founders and a team with experience at Tesla and Meta Reality Labs, Antioch is headquartered in New York.

Contact:

Yuval Porat
Media consultant
[email protected]

Additional quotes:

In AI-powered manufacturing, development speed, precision, and predictability are critical. With Antioch, we have been able to meaningfully accelerate our time to market. We can test all of the scenarios that our systems will see in production, and edge cases that are otherwise impractical or uneconomical. This is critical for a company like ours, with teams on each side of the Atlantic. Simulation isn't new, but simulation with this kind of impact is. - Jon Quick, CEO, Launchpad Build AI

"Simulation has the potential to be a massive unlock for Physical AI, but it remains one of the hardest parts of the stack to get right. Antioch is the best team we've seen at solving the problems that matter most, including scene creation, eval analysis, and most importantly, closing the sim-to-real gap. Together with Nebius infrastructure, they're turning simulation from a highly specialized capability into something Physical AI teams can use continuously to develop, test, and improve their systems." - Evan Helda, Head of Physical AI, Nebius

NVIDIA Partnership

Antioch is partnering with NVIDIA and integrating the company's open Physical AI stack - including NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and open robotics simulation and learning frameworks such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab - to help developers scale testing across thousands of simulated scenarios and accelerate end-to-end robotics development.

SOURCE: Antioch

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

D.Lopez--AT