Rerun Secures $17M Seed Funding to Revolutionize Physical AI Data Infrastructure

Rerun's open-source AI platform for robots, drones and cars revs up with $17M seed | TechCrunch

As Generative AI moves increasingly into the physical world through robotics, vehicles and drones, the need to map cloud-based AIs to real-world environments can lead to a huge mismatch. Rerun, a Stockholm-based dev tools startup, which builds a data stack for this emergent kind of "Physical AI", has secured $17 million in seed funding to help AI developers smooth out the bumps from code to road, as it were. The seed round was led by Point Nine capital out of Germany, bringing the 2022-founded startup's total funding to date to $20.2 million. Nikolaus West, Co-Founder and CEO of Rerun, told TechCrunch that AI which operates in the physical world is already booming. Per West, Rerun's database and cloud data platform is built from the ground-up for Physical AI data and workflows, managing multimodal data such as video streams, 3D scenes, and tensors. The startup's multimodal data stack supports visual debugging, helping developers to track back through their bots' movements to better understand where things might be going wrong -- importing data from real world sensors to power spatial visualization and analytics. "The data infrastructure that exists for AI does not really understand physical AI data. And old-school robotics tools are not built for the machine learning world, so the data breaks, and trying to use both these things together creates a huge amount of friction for the teams," West explained. He suggests there is a potential "data flywheel" effect in creating AI geared to the physical world. The smarter the system is, the more robotics units can be deployed, which in turn means more data to train the AI model on, ensuring better outcomes, per West. But to get there the startup's conviction is that AI developers need dedicated tools to help their models move smoothly through the real world. Visualizations of Physical AI data created by Rerun's open source platform have been incorporated into other open source projects by companies such as Meta, Google, Hugging Face, and Unitree. The Rerun team is drawn from veterans from the likes of Apple, AWS, Meta, Unity, Zenly and Zipline. CTO, Emil Ernerfeldt, is also the creator of egui, the biggest open source GUI framework in Rust. Commenting in a statement, Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a partner at Point Nine, said Rerun's strength in open source led to the investment -- which is a notably large seed round for a European startup. "Rerun's work on open source has allowed them to gain the trust of some of the most ambitious companies in the world of Physical AI," he suggested. Sunflower Capital also participated in Rerun's seed round, along with existing investors Costanoa Ventures and Seedcamp.

Rerun gets $17M to build the essential data infrastructure for AI-powered robots, drones and cars - SiliconANGLE

Rerun gets $17M to build the essential data infrastructure for AI-powered robots, drones and cars Stockholm-based startup Rerun.io AB announced today it has raised $17 million in seed funding to build out a multimodal data stack for what it calls "physical AI". Today's round was led by Point Nine and saw participation from Sunflower Capital and existing investors Coatanoa Ventures and Seedcamp. Angel investors such as Vercel Inc. Chief Executive Guillermo Rauch and Y Combinator General Partner Nicolas Dessaigne also participated in the round, which brings Rerun's total funding to date to $20.2 million. The startup is building a data infrastructure platform that's becoming increasingly sought-after as generative artificial intelligence capabilities shift into the real world, via robots, drones and autonomous vehicles. Its database and visualization tools are built from the ground up to support the various types of data that's streamed from these "physical AI" sources, including video streams, audio, sensor readings, tensors and 3D visualizations. Its multimodal data stack supports important features such as visual debugging, which can help developers to piece together a robot or drone's prior movements to understand where things might be going wrong. It enables companies to import the data from these intelligent machines rapidly, and then use it to create spatial visualizations and conduct detailed analytics. Rerun believes there's going to be big demand for this kind of platform because physical AI is rapidly becoming a thing. As more and more autonomous vehicles hit the road, as humanoid robots begin working alongside humans in factories and warehouses, and as spatial computing moves into the mainstream, a bottleneck is building up in the supporting data infrastructure. Rerun co-founder and CEO Nikolaus West (pictured center, alongside his co-founders Emil Ernerfeldt and Moritz Schiebold) points out that most of the world's gross domestic product arises from the physical world, and so that means there's a massive opportunity for physical AI to transform the global economy. "But the current data stack wasn't built for this reality," he added. Advances in robotics, drones, spatial computing and so on mean that AI systems are interacting with the real world more than ever before. Such systems rely on an assortment of cameras, lidar and sensors to perceive the world around them and guide their actions, but the data they produce doesn't play nicely with existing database tools. As such, it becomes difficult to understand and analyze this information properly, and that's slowing down progress. "Say a robot drives into a wall. Why did it do that?," West asked. "You need tools that allow you to see the world through the eyes of the robot to know why it acted the way it did. And that's what we've built." The startup's database is designed to support complex multimodal data that's created by 3D scenes, video streams and tensors, and it's combined with an open-source visualization toolkit that supports use cases such as simple observation and experimentation and training. Both tools can be accessed for free, but the company is building a commercial-grade version of its database that will become generally available later this year. The open-source versions have already gained significant traction, with a vibrant Discord community and users including Meta Platforms Inc., Google LLC, Hugging Face Inc. and more. According to the startup, most robotics and drone developers have had to build their own data infrastructure and visualization systems, but doing so takes a long time and the results are often subpar. Rerun Chief Operating Officer Schiebold said this has led to a bottleneck that affects the speed of product development. "There is a data flywheel in physical AI, and the smarter your system is, the more units you can deploy, which allows you to collect more data to train on, making your system even smarter," he explained. "Rerun helps teams run more experiments faster, which is the biggest lever on development speed." Point Nine Partner Ricardo Sequerra Amram said he was most excited about the strength of Rerun's open-source products. "Its work on open source has allowed it to gain the trust of some of the most ambitious companies in the world of physical AI," he pointed out. Looking forward, Rerun wants to use the money to expand, and it plans to double the size of its team by the end of the year, while doubling down on its plans to launch the commercial version of its multimodal database. At the same time, it will continue to advance its open-source products to integrate them more deeply with robotics and other physical AI devices.

Rerun Raises $17M to Build the Data Infrastructure Powering the Physical AI Revolution

STOCKHOLM, March 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rerun, the company building the multimodal data stack for Physical AI, today announced that it secured $17 million in Seed funding led by Point Nine, with participation from Sunflower Capital and existing investors Costanoa Ventures and Seedcamp. Notable angel investors including Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Oliver Cameron (CEO of Odyssey), Wes McKinney (creator of pandas, Apache Arrow and Ibis), Eric Jang (VP of AI at 1X) and Nicolas Dessaigne (General Partner at Y Combinator) also joined the round. This brings Rerun's total funding to date to $20.2 million. "Most of the world's GDP exists in the physical world, creating an enormous opportunity for Physical AI to transform our economy," said Nikolaus West, Co-Founder and CEO of Rerun. "But the current data stack wasn't built for this new reality." AI systems increasingly interact with the physical world through robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, and spatial computing devices. These systems use cameras and sensors to perceive their environment and perform actions based on that perception. The datasets these systems produce don't fit nicely into tools built for classic software development. The difficulty of understanding and working with this data is significantly slowing down industry progress. This is at a time when Physical AI is seeing skyrocketing investment. As more humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles, and spatial computing devices move toward commercial deployment, data infrastructure is becoming a key bottleneck. "Say a robot drives into a wall. Why did it do that? You need tools that allow you to see the world through the eyes of the robot to know why it acted the way it did," says West. "That's what we've built." Rerun is launching a new database and cloud data platform purpose-built for Physical AI data and workflows. The database is designed to manage complex multimodal data such as video streams, 3D scenes, and tensors that evolve at varying rates over time. Combined with Rerun's popular open source visualization toolkit, this first-of-its-kind, new multimodal data stack supports everything from observability to experimentation and training. The new commercial offering is in development with select design partners and scheduled for general availability later in the year. Rerun's open source project-which made it simple to create high performance visualizations of Physical AI data-hit a nerve with the community. Today it has a vibrant Discord community, and is used in open source projects by companies like Meta, Google, Hugging Face's LeRobot, and Unitree. "Previously, everyone -- from robotics to autonomous vehicles to AR -- built much of their visualization and data infrastructure in-house. But despite a lot of investment, even the biggest companies in the world weren't happy with the results," says West. "We realized they were building on the wrong foundation. The old stack lacked performance and flexibility. Inspired by the flexible data models in gaming engines, we rewrote ours from the ground up in Rust." The Rerun team of robotics, autonomy, drone and data systems veterans come from Apple, AWS, Meta, Unity, Zenly and Zipline. It includes the creator of the rosbag format, key contributors to Apache Datafusion, and their CTO, Emil Ernerfeldt, is the creator of egui, the biggest open source GUI framework in Rust. Traditional data tools for robotics are file oriented and lack the flexible data management needed for rapid experimentation and dataset curation. On the other hand, classic data warehouses and lakehouse architectures lack deep support for Physical AI data, which forces developers to maintain complex translation layers and duplicate code between systems. Rerun is solving these problems by bringing its flexible data model for Physical AI into the database. That gives teams built-in visualization, high performance, and simpler, more flexible systems. "All companies developing Physical AI are bottlenecked on speed of product development," said Moritz Schiebold, Co-Founder and COO. "There is a data flywheel in Physical AI. The smarter your system is, the more units you get to deploy, which allows you to collect more data to train on, which makes your system even smarter. Rerun helps teams run more experiments faster, which is the biggest lever on development speed." "Rerun's mission to build the multimodal data stack for Physical AI is wildly ambitious and we're excited to support Emil, Moritz, Niko and team on their journey," said Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a partner at Point Nine. "Their work on open source has allowed them to gain the trust of some of the most ambitious companies in the world of Physical AI. As AI goes into the world of atoms, we believe Rerun can be the foundational platform enabling companies to build, iterate and ship better products continuously." The company plans to double its team size by the end of the year, focusing on building out its commercial database offering and making the open source project more deeply integrated into the Robotics and Physical AI ecosystems. About Rerun Rerun is building the multimodal data stack for Physical AI. Founded in 2022 by Nikolaus West, Emil Ernerfeldt, and Moritz Schiebold, the company combines open-source visualization tools with a high-performance commercial database designed specifically for robotics, autonomous vehicles, spatial computing, and other Physical AI applications. Rerun is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden with a distributed team across the US and Europe. About Point Nine Point Nine is a software-first, early-stage venture capital firm investing globally from Europe. Since 2008, Point Nine has been amongst the first investors in companies like Algolia, Chainalysis, Contentful, Docplanner, Loom, Mambu, Revolut, Typeform, and Zendesk. At any given time, each of the firm's four equal partners works closely with 6-8 companies to maximize the chance of success of each company. Images of the Rerun founders and team here. Media Contact: Moritz Schiebold [email protected] Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Rerun Raises $17 Million for Database Purpose-Built for Physical AI | PYMNTS.com

Rerun has secured $17 million in seed funding as it works to build out its database and cloud data platform purpose-built for the physical artificial intelligence (AI) data and workflows needed for robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones and spatial computing devices. The database is designed to manage video streams, 3D scenes, tensors and other complex multimodal data, the company said in a Thursday (March 20) press release. "Say a robot drives into a wall. Why did it do that? You need tools that allow you to see the world through the eyes of the robot to know why it acted the way it did," Rerun Co-founder and CEO Nikolaus West said in the release. "That's what we've built." The database will work with Rerun's existing open source visualization toolkit that helps users create high-performance visualizations of physical AI data, according to the release. Currently in development with select design partners, the database is scheduled to be made generally available later this year, per the release. Ricardo Sequerra Amram, a partner at Point Nine, which led the seed funding round, said in the release that Rerun's open-source project "allowed them to gain the trust of some of the most ambitious companies in the world of Physical AI." "As AI goes into the world of atoms, we believe Rerun can be the foundational platform enabling companies to build, iterate and ship better products continuously," Amram said in the release. This news comes shortly after some other announcements of investments in projects related to physical AI. Dexterity said March 11 that it raised $95 million in additional funding to accelerate its development of physical AI. The company leverages hundreds of physical AI models to enable robots to load trucks and perform other tasks in logistics, warehousing and supply chain operations. In February, Apptronik raised $350 million to help deploy its AI-powered humanoid robot, Apollo, which is designed to work alongside humans in a range of industries, including automotive, electronics, third-party logistics, beverage bottling and fulfillment, and consumer packaged goods.