Antioch Lands $32M to Expand Robot Simulation Platform

Antioch Inc., a simulation software company, unveiled a $32 million funding round aimed at accelerating product development, expanding its engineering team, and advancing simulation capabilities for robotics, autonomy, and perception organizations.

The startup is tackling a fundamental challenge in autonomous machine development: the need to validate every modification through physical testing on actual hardware. This approach consumes significant resources in equipment and labor. Antioch's platform addresses this by calibrating simulation software to match a customer's specific hardware, then executing tests across cloud servers. Organizations that previously could conduct a single physical trial can now run thousands of simulated tests simultaneously.

Co-founder Harry Mellsop emphasized that deploying autonomous systems in real-world conditions demands a fresh testing methodology grounded in high-fidelity simulation capable of enabling "faster, safer, and more reliable deployment."

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. Antioch's simulations have closely matched our physical test results, including in scenarios we deliberately held out of calibration.

Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon.com Inc. and chief product officer at its Ring unit

Founded in May 2025, Antioch is approximately 16 months into operations. Mellsop previously led Autopilot development at Tesla Inc. The company was established by five co-founders, including Alex Langshur and Michael Calvey, who had earlier created Transpose Inc., which Chainalysis Inc. acquired in 2023. The remaining two co-founders came from Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc.'s Reality Labs.

Nvidia Corp. serves as a strategic partner, with Antioch incorporating the company's open physical artificial intelligence stack, encompassing Omniverse libraries and the Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab robotics frameworks. This integration enables developers to distribute testing across thousands of simulated environments. Nebius Group N.V. also partners with the startup, providing cloud computing resources. Evan Helda, head of physical AI at Nebius, described simulation as "one of the hardest parts of the stack to get right."

Greylock Partners led the Series A investment, joined by A* Capital, Category Ventures, BoxGroup Ventures, and Icehouse Ventures Ltd. The round also attracted individual investors including Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer at Palantir Technologies Inc.; Adrian Macneil, Chief Executive of Foxglove Inc.; and Ian Andrews, an Nvidia executive with prior experience at Groq Inc.

Saam Motamedi, a general partner at Greylock, characterized physical AI and robotics as experiencing "a key inflection moment" and positioned Antioch as constructing the foundational development platform for the industry's next growth phase.

The company previously raised $4.25 million in a pre-seed round during December, followed by $8.5 million in April. Combined with the latest funding, total capital invested in Antioch now reaches $44.75 million.