A team of AI researchers led by two Slovenians has left Nvidia to launch Veeda AI, a Toronto-based startup developing virtual environments where robots can learn and practise tasks before operating in the real world, startup news media outlet The Recursive reported on August 24.
Veeda AI has raised more than $90mn (€84mn) in seed financing, in one of Canada's largest seed rounds. The funding was co-led by Radical Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Khosla Ventures.
"We started Veeda because we believe robotics will reshape the world—changing how we move people and goods, how we manufacture and build, and how we operate in the physical world. We also firmly believe that the scaling moment for Physical AI will come from robots learning through interaction with the world," the company CEO’s Sanja Fidler said on LinkedIn.
The startup aims to address a major challenge in physical AI: the lack of large datasets showing how robots should interact with the physical world. While language models can train on vast quantities of online text, there is no equivalent database covering tasks such as opening doors, handling objects or navigating cluttered spaces.
Veeda plans to create scalable virtual worlds where robots can repeatedly learn, fail and improve through simulation before attempting tasks in reality.
CEO Sanja Fidler, who grew up in Slovenia and holds a doctorate from the University of Ljubljana, previously served as Nvidia's vice-president of AI research and headed its Toronto-based Spatial Intelligence Lab.
She co-founded Veeda with Slovenian researcher Zan Gojcic, who serves as chief technology officer, and Huan Ling, the company's chief scientist. All three previously worked at Nvidia.
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