Noetive Exits Stealth With $41M Seed for Industrial AI
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Noetive has come out of stealth with $41 million in Seed funding. The industrial AI company’s software learns how a factory floor or a freight operation actually runs from day to day. Design partners in manufacturing, logistics, energy, and data centers are already using it.
The company is based in San Francisco. Eclipse Ventures led the round. Craft Ventures Management, The Westly Group, Swish Ventures, Factory, Incite Ventures, Gigascale Capital, Operator Partners, and Liquid 2 Ventures also invested. Incite was founded by Nest co-founder Matt Rogers, and Gigascale was started by former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer. Individual investors include Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, Airbnb CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, and the three co-founders of Decart.AI.
Chief executive Amir Frenkel has argued that most AI products so far were designed for information work that lives on the internet. Running a plant or a distribution network is a different problem: materials, machinery, labor, and suppliers all shift constantly, and the decisions that tie them together still rest on data trapped in siloed systems that were never built to coordinate a whole business.
Noetive’s answer is what it calls an intelligence of record. At the center sits a self-improving model the company refers to as a brain. Agents built on it run on top of the tools a customer already uses and take on the hardest operational problems end to end, with each deployment making the model more capable. Physical conditions reach the system through a multimodal sensing pod that Noetive designs itself.
Steuben Foods is one early partner. Its chief executive, Menachem Katz, said production planning has always been among the most time-consuming parts of the business because small changes ripple outward. Noetive now reads both Steuben’s system data and conditions on the factory floor, and Katz said work that once happened monthly and took a week of planning now happens daily and takes minutes.
Frenkel spent nearly a decade as a vice president at Meta and has held leadership roles at Alphabet and Amazon. The rest of the team comes from those companies and from Fortune 500 businesses, and includes researchers who have worked on foundation models. Bloomberg reported in April that Eclipse had hired Frenkel from Meta as its first chief AI officer, and Noetive took shape inside the firm from there, with Eclipse helping recruit the founding team.
The money will fund research into self-improving AI for physical operations. Field testing continues with a curated group of design partners while the company recruits AI researchers and full-stack engineers.
Eclipse founder and CEO Lior Susan said the $30 trillion physical economy has largely been left behind by AI, and that the firm built Noetive to go after it.
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