Rerun Raises $17 Million for Database Purpose-Built for Physical AI

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.

In January, Sereact raised $26 million for its AI-powered robotics efforts, which include support for humanoid and mobile robots.

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