Antioch Raises $32M to Bring Robot Testing Into Simulation
Antioch, a startup using simulation to test autonomous machines, raises $32M to cut reliance on physical hardware; Amazon's Ring is among customers.
Antioch’s software calibrates a simulation to a customer’s own hardware and runs it on cloud infrastructure. The company said this lets a team that could previously afford one physical experiment run thousands of simulated evaluations in parallel, addressing the cost in hardware and engineer hours that physical testing currently demands.
Co-founder Harry Mellsop, who worked on Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot software, said in a release that taking autonomous systems into the real world requires a new approach to testing, one built on high-fidelity simulation that supports “faster, safer, and more reliable deployment.”
Amazon.com Inc.’s Ring is among the companies working with Antioch. Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon and chief product officer at Ring, said in the release that “Antioch’s simulations have closely matched our physical test results, including in scenarios we deliberately held out of calibration.”
The Series A round was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from A* Capital, Category Ventures, BoxGroup Ventures and Icehouse Ventures Ltd. Individual backers include Palantir Technologies Inc. Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, Foxglove Inc. Chief Executive Adrian Macneil and Nvidia executive Ian Andrews. Antioch raised $4.25 million in a pre-seed round in December and $8.5 million in April, bringing total investment in the company to $44.75 million.
Antioch is about 16 months old. Mellsop founded it in May 2025 with four others. Two co-founders, Alex Langshur and Michael Calvey, previously founded security startup Transpose Inc., which Chainalysis Inc. acquired in 2023. The other two came from Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Reality Labs.
The company said Nvidia Corp. is a partner, and it is integrating Nvidia’s open physical AI stack, including Omniverse libraries and the Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab robotics frameworks, to help developers spread testing across thousands of simulated scenarios. Nebius Group N.V. is a partner providing cloud infrastructure. Evan Helda, Nebius’s head of physical AI, called simulation “one of the hardest parts of the stack to get right.” Saam Motamedi, a Greylock general partner, said physical AI and robotics are “hitting a key inflection moment” and that Antioch is building the core development platform for the next phase of the market.