NeoCognition Raises $40M in Seed Funding

The round also saw participation from Vista Equity Partners and others. Angel investors and founding advisors include Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel; Ion Stoica, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks; A&E Investments; Salience Capital Partners; Nepenthe Capital; Frontiers Capital; and leading AI researchers like Dawn Song, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Luke Zettlemoyer, among others.

Coming out of stealth, NeoCognition is building a new type of AI agent that learns how different systems and workflows operate and becomes specialized in specific domains. These agents develop a "world model" of work, which helps them improve over time. As a result, they become faster, cheaper, and more reliable. This deeper understanding also makes them safer and more responsible, especially in high-stakes environments.

Yu Su, CEO and Co-Founder of NeoCognition and a Sloan Research Fellow, leads one of the leading AI agent research labs at Ohio State University. His team started working on large language model-based agents even before the rise of ChatGPT. Over time, they produced important research, including Mind2Web, MMMU, and SeeAct, which helped shape the field of modern AI agents. Their work is widely used in advanced AI systems developed by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

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"Dr. Su and his team have already developed research that spans every piece of the agent puzzle, ranging from perception to memory, planning, evaluation, and safety," said Lip-Bu Tan, Founding Managing Partner of Walden Catalyst Ventures. "We are confident NeoCognition is uniquely positioned to tackle the hardest challenges in agentic AI."

"AI today is fundamentally unreliable when it comes to executing real work that requires deep expertise," said Yu Su. "The true power of human intelligence is the ability to learn and specialize continuously. Our approach mirrors how humans gain expertise on the job through building a structured model of their micro-world, and would eliminate the extensive manual customization required by current models."

"As general-purpose agents become table stakes, the key challenge in AI is achieving expert-level intelligence," said Ion Stoica, UC Berkeley Professor and Databricks Co-Founder. "NeoCognition's new approach to building agents that learn to become experts has the potential to reach the level of reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness required for high-stakes applications."

"At the core of NeoCognition is a novel learning mechanism that will allow agents to specialize very quickly," said Landon Downs, Managing Partner at Cambium Capital. "We have strong conviction in the team's expertise and believe their research is charting a new path toward specialized intelligence that will democratize access to frontier agent capabilities."

About NeoCognition

Founded in 2025 by Yu Su, Yu Gu and Xiang Deng, NeoCognition is an AI agent lab based in Palo Alto California. The company focuses on building AI agents that can continuously learn, and develop expert level skills making specialized knowledge more widely accessible.

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